Moral Quotes

For many years, I tried to make New Year's resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.

~ Henry Rollins

Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world.

~ Robert Reich

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

~ Thomas Hardy

Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.

~ Frank Rich

Is there a point at which we hit a tipping point and all of this economic, cultural and moral trouble sends us into a death spiral we can't get out of?

~ Joel C. Rosenberg

While the law cannot force a person to be moral or tolerant, through the law we can demand respect and expect equality.

~ Donna Brazile

Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated.

~ Tom G. Palmer

Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

~ Gary L. Francione

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

~ George Washington

Intelligence is a moral category.

~ Theodor Adorno

The measure of and self-congratulation for our own intelligence should have its basis in our moral behavior as well as our smarts.

~ April Gornik

Intelligence is not a moral category.

~ Tucker Carlson

Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.

~ Marian Wright Edelman

Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.

~ David Ben-Gurion

The Declaration of Independence was to set forth the moral justification of a rebellion against a long-recognized political tradition - the divine right of kings.

~ Ezra Taft Benson

Millions of Americans cannot tell you who lived at Mount Vernon or who wrote the Declaration of Independence - let alone the Emancipation Proclamation. But they know that to be 'a Benedict Arnold' is to be a traitor of the deepest dye - someone who coldly betrays not only a sacred cause but every moral scruple along the way.

~ Arthur L. Herman

Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world.

~ Norman Borlaug

There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and entertainment. This concern about animals reflects both our own moral development as a civilization and our recognition that the differences between humans and animals are, for the most part, differences of degree and not of kind.

~ Gary L. Francione

The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don't.

~ Richard Dawkins

Moral values, and a culture and a religion, maintaining these values are far better than laws and regulations.

~ Swami Sivananda

Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that contains moral, ethical, and legal truisms that any person of any religion or even an atheist can recognize and appreciate.

~ Cliff Stearns

The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.

~ Bill Gates

Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.

~ Emmeline Pankhurst

There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

~ Steven Spielberg

History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.

~ Gerald R. Ford

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

~ Ma Jian

Peace, plenty, and contentment reign throughout our borders, and our beloved country presents a sublime moral spectacle to the world.

~ James K. Polk

Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.

~ Al Gore

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

~ Arnold J. Toynbee

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.

~ Jonathan Sacks

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

~ Ida Tarbell

Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.

~ John Adams

I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

~ Martin Luther King

Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice.

~ Anita Roddick

Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture.

~ Muhammad Iqbal

Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have.

~ Andrew Young

I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.

~ William A. Dembski

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

~ Conrad Black

Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.

~ John Stuart Mill

Playing a bad guy is always a freeing experience, because you don't have the same envelope of restrictions as you have playing a good guy. Good guys restrain themselves; they kind of have their moral fiber cut out for them in varying degrees.

~ John Travolta