If someone was going to kill someone dear to you, and you could stop that person by killing them instead, would you kill them, knowing it was an effective way to save your loved one?

What you withhold in this life will be withheld from you in the next.

The values most important to us are always the most easily exploitable.

[At the scene of a murder]

The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting--for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way.

Like tiny gods, all that we say and do holds a power so great that any one of us in any given moment can be responsible for the birth of a new civilization or the collapse of our own.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.