“The [articles of the Genva Convention] adopted by The International Committee drew upon...the codes of a warrior's honour...these codes vary from culture to culture and their common features are the oldest artifacts of human morality: from Christian chivalry... to the Japanese Bushido or way of the warrior... The codes acknowledged the moral paradox of battle: that those who fight ...bravely are bound [by]...mutual respect...”

“It is fear that turns minor difference into major, that makes the gulf between ethnicities into a distinction between species, between human and non-human.”

“At Waterloo, the common dead were left to rot on the battlefield; their bones were gathered up by English contractors, shipped back to Britain, ground up, and used as bonemeal and fertilizer.”

“...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.”

“I admit I must have been impossible to live with. It was the self-righteousness of the grieving--my idea that I would betray him if I carried on as before, if I went through the motions of living--that must have driven my family apart from me. I still do not understand those instincts that lead you to flee the ones who want to help you, that lead you to take revenge upon them for a sorrow that is not their fault.”

“Rather than offering a strict moral code to live by, popular culture today provides more of a moral posture.”

“Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code — family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy, ... restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an "obscene" sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than the failure to abide by the code.”