Morality Quotes

Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region.The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.

~ Noam Chomsky

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

~ Václav Havel

Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.

~ Taylor Caldwell

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

~ Robert B. Reich

As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.

~ Leon Trotsky

Court games aren't fair. They don't judge men by their worth, and they aren't about what's just. Guilty men can hold power their whole lives and be wept for when they pass. Innocent men can be spent like coins because it's convenient. You don't have to have sinned for them to ruin you. If your destruction is useful to them, you'll be destroyed.

~ Daniel Abraham

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)

~ Christopher Hitchens

Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck.

~ Richard Just

Politics devoid of ethics does not further human welfare, and life without morality reduces humans to the level of beasts.

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

One did not need to believe in the Force to know right from wrong. Many who held no faith in the Force acted righteously, and he had known more than one sentient who had acted selfishly, even cruelly, and used belief to justify doing so.

~ Greg Rucka

An educated, healthy & confident nation is harder to govern

~ Tony Benn

It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal—especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself:This is not normal.Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass.Because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address.And that is not normal.It is fucked up.

~ John Oliver

Your moral values & ability to rationalize, not your religious beliefs or political affiliations define what you should stand for in society.

~ Mamur Mustapha

The goal of radicalism is to improve the human condition, not to prove one's own moral superiority.

~ Jack Newfield

What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.

~ Karl R. Popper

To know the good from the bad, study a man or woman's history of actions, not their record of intentions.

~ Suzy Kassem

When a moral man speaks, listen. But when immoral men speak, toss away their words like bad fruit. Truth will never shine from a heart filled with corruption and lies.

~ Suzy Kassem

Can anyone maintain power without lying? It looks to me like living without breathing. Morality apart, I think some evils are part and parcel of nature and we cannot do without them. Sometimes evil is even necessary to run this evil nature.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

To impart a moral responsibility to exercise fairness in leadership builds greater leaders of strong character.

~ Wayne Chirisa

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

~ Virginia Woolf

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The time came to put Iris Duarte back on the plane.It was a morning flight which made it difficult. I wasused to rising at noon; it was a fine cure for hangoversand would add 5 years to my life. I felt no sadnesswhile driving her to L.A. International. The sex hadbeen fine; there had been laughter. I could hardlyremember a more civilized time, neither of us makingany demands, yet there had been warmth, it had notbeen without feeling, dead meat coupled with deadmeat. I detested that type of swinging, the LosAngeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beachkind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers whenyou part—a gymnasium of bodies namelesslymasturbating each other. People with no morals oftenconsidered themselves more free, but mostly theylacked the ability to feel or to love. So they becameswingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was nogamble or humor in their game—it was corpsefucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they weregrounded on human experience down through thecenturies. Some morals tended to keep peopleslaves in factories, in churches and true to the State.Other morals simply made good sense. It was like agarden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. Youhad to know which to pick and eat, which to leavealone.

~ Charles Bukowski

My Lady, you certainly tell me about wonderful constancy, strength and virtue and firmness of women, so can one say the same thing about men? (...)Response [by Lady Rectitude]: Fair sweet friend, have you not yet heard the saying that the fool sees well enough a small cut in the face of his neighbour, but he disregards the great gaping one above his own eye? I will show you the great contradiction in what the men say about the changeability and inconstancy of women. It is true that they all generally insist that women are very frail [= fickle] by nature. And since they accuse women of frailty, one would suppose that they themselves take care to maintain a reputation for constancy, or at the very least, that the women are indeed less so than they are themselves. And yet, it is obvious that they demand of women greater constancy than they themselves have, for they who claim to be of this strong and noble condition cannot refrain from a whole number of very great defects and sins, and not out of ignorance, either, but out of pure malice, knowing well how badly they are misbehaving. But all this they excuse in themselves and say that it is in the nature of man to sin, yet if it so happens that any women stray into any misdeed (of which they themselves are the cause by their great power and longhandedness), then it's suddenly all frailty and inconstancy, they claim. But it seems to me that since they do call women frail, they should not support that frailty, and not ascribe to them as a great crime what in themselves they merely consider a little defect.

~ Christine De Pizan

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.

~ Nicholas D. Kristof

Men, some to business take, some to pleasure take; but every woman is at heart a rake

~ Alexander Pope

Fashion is neither moral or immoral, but it is for rebuilding the morale.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.

~ Christine De Pizan

Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

~ Virginia Woolf

To be beautiful is a good thing, for which we should thank Nature—to be attractive, morally, rather than physically, is, however, a thing for which we should thank Nature even more, if she be good enough to have endowed us with that lasting quality.

~ Unknown

Perhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: if this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to — as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence — wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself.

~ Jessica Valenti

You sit behind a computer all day. You see a name on your screen – not realizing that this is a person with a life, a family, friends, hopes, and dreams. Then you destroy that life by electing them; and I get it. There’s only so much you can do. But once the day is over, you go home, collect a paycheck, and forget about it. That’s what I can’t seem to understand.

~ Tess Alley

I am not convinced within myself that to its core and as a whole, humanity has, as some like to assume, progressed a great deal over the millennia. Human technology? Of course. Human beings? Hardly.

~ Criss Jami

Take away all the moral beauty and sweetness in the Word, and the Bible is left wholly a dead letter, a dry, lifeless, tasteless thing. By this is seen the true foundation of our duty, the worthiness of God to be so esteemed, honoured, loved, submitted to, and served, as He requires of us, and the amiableness of the duties themselves that are required of us. And by this is seen the true evil of sin; for he who sees the beauty of holiness must necessarily see the hatefulness of sin, its contrary. By this men understand the true glory of heaven, which consists in the beauty and happiness that is in holiness. By this is seen the amiableness and happiness of both saints and angels. He that sees beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fulness of all things, without which all the world is empty, no better than nothing, yea, worse than nothing. Unless this is seen, nothing is seen that is worth the seeing; for there is no other true excellency or beauty. Unless this be understood, nothing is understood that is worthy of the exercise of the noble faculty of understanding. This is the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the infinite Fountain of good; without which, God Himself (if that were possible) would be an infinite evil; without which we ourselves had better never have been; and without which there had better have been no being.

~ Jonathan Edwards

hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.

~ G.e. Moore

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

~ C.s. Lewis

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

~ C.s. Lewis

The Golden Rule is intolerable; if millions did to others whatever they wished others to do to them, few would be safe from molestation. The Golden Rule shows anything but moral genius, and the claim by which it is followed in the Sermon on the Mount -- 'this is the Law and the Prophets' -- makes little sense.

~ Walter Kaufmann

Contemporary Christians have declared war on individual immorality but seem remarkably silent about the evil of systems, especially corporate greed and malfeasance. (p. 176)

~ Robin R. Meyers