47 Quotes by Michael J. Sandel

The mere fact that a group of people in the past agreed to a constitution is not enough to make that constitution just.

It isn’t easy to teach students to be citizens, capable of thinking critically about the world around them, when so much of childhood consists of basic training for a consumer society.

Call center technology enables companies to “score” incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from affluent places.

The most obvious reason for giving the best flutes to the best flute players is that doing so will produce the best music, making us listeners better off. But this is not Aristotle’s reason. He thinks the best flutes should go to the best flute players because that’s what flutes are for – to be played well.

Conformity, in Mill’s account, is the enemy of the best way to live.

A carefully crafted evasion pays homage to the duty of truth-telling in a way that an outright lie does not. Anyone who goes to the bother of concocting a misleading but technically true statement when a simple lie would do expresses, however obliquely, respect for the moral law.

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else.

If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities.

We’re not only sentient beings, governed by the pleasure and pain delivered by our senses; we are also rational beings, capable of reason. If reason determines my will, then the will becomes the power to choose independent of the dictates of nature or inclination.