Morality Quotes

Without moral values, which should begin in Congress, America will lose her roots, her basis, her thesis.

~ Janine Turner

To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her--is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil...?

~ Gregory Maguire

Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.

~ Norman Geras

Most morality, thought Mma Ramotswe, was about doing the right thing because it had been identified as such by a long process of acceptance and observance. You simply could not create your own morality because your experience would never be enough to do so. What gives you the right to say that you know better than your ancestors? Morality is for everybody and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual person, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave it.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.

~ Robert Hughes

On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

In the end, we all have our different levels of moral values.

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Morality is all right, but what about dividends?

~ Kaiser Wilhelm Ii

Yes, our country has its shortcomings, but there's no moral equivalency between democracy and totalitarianism…There's no moral equivalency between propaganda and the truth.

~ Ronald Reagan

The sooner we wake up and realise that we have a moral duty to guide and protect this planet, the sooner things will improve for every form of life on this planet.

~ Mango Wodzak

As the savage progresses, he acquires experience and formulates codes of 'right' and 'wrong' from his memories of those courses which have helped or hurt him... Then out of the principle of barter comes the illusion of 'justice' ...

~ Lovecraft H.p.

We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?

~ Carl Sagan

There is something so pure and frank and noble about him that to doubt his sincerity would be like doubting the brightness of the sun.

~ Charles Jefferson

Moral concepts are useful to the extent that they provoke opposition.

~ Marty Rubin

That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.

~ Mark Twain

Secular ideologies preach liberty but practice tyranny.

~ Nancy Pearcey

There's something immoral about abandoning your common sense in matters of social importance.

~ A.e. Samaan

When you look down the length of your chain and see it is made mostly of weak links it is time to pull out the bolt cutters.

~ Donavan Nelson Butler

The only kinds of sexual dysfunction are abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage.

~ Alfred C. Kinsey

There is no need to corrupt people's morals. Their morals have been corrupting them for years.

~ Marty Rubin

Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life – and being successful.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between good and evil, but maybe we should understand, as Zimbardo's work suggested, that evil is incremental - something we are all capable of, given the right circumstances.

~ Shane Bauer

The world is going to turn upside down in a way that the honest man will live uncomfortably -- while the dishonest man will live very comfortably. Pay attention to the windows of the Four Seasons next time you stroll by their dining room. You will find thugs and hustlers of every creed living like true kings and queens.

~ Suzy Kassem

Logic is not a sure enough defense against moral bankruptcy.

~ Mark Sappenfield

Well, do you suppose I made up my mind then that what I had seen was something sickening? Not a bit of it. 'If it was done with such assurance and everyone thought it was necessary, then they must have known something I didn't,' was what I thought, and I tried to find out what it was. But I couldn't, no matter how hard I exerted myself. And since I couldn't, I couldn't join the army as I'd planned to, and not only did I not join the army, I couldn't find a place for myself anywhere in society, and ended up being no good for anything, as you can see.'Oh yes, we know all about how you're no good for anything,' said one of us, 'But tell us: how many men would be no good for anything if it weren't for the likes of you?

~ Leo Tolstoy

Are guilt and regret not messages from inside of us, letting us know that our moral compasses have been recalibrated and are pointing in the right direction?

~ Rhian J. Martin

Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

~ Abhijit Naskar

...[T]o be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often be very advantageous to me, although to abide by it is certainly safer.

~ Immanuel Kant

Do not judge to Anyone, Do not let anyone to judge you.But Every person must have little moral and honest to judge themselves.

~ Mohammed Zaki Ansari

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction.

~ Immanuel Kant

In Confucian thought, individuals practice moral virtue both by restraining themselves and pursuing their own interests. This is a dual push-and-pull process. In today’s China, the latter is taken care of by capitalism and commerce. The former, however, needs to be taken care of by the rule of law. Otherwise, the system of governance is corrupted by unrestrained individual desires and selective enforcement of ‘virtue’ or law.

~ Patrick Mendis

And we remember that there must be a balance. No birth without death. No life without tears. What is taken from the world must be given back, and from him who takes and does not give back, who would tip the balance of the river, from him all will be taken. No one should live forever, but should give his blood to the river when the time comes so that tomorrow another may live. And so it goes.

~ Jessica Khoury

Authority is not a substitute for truth.

~ Jennifer Mcveigh

...I do not think that it is right for a man to appeal to the jury or to get himself acquitted by doing so; he ought to inform them of the facts and convince them by argument. The jury does not sit to dispense justice as a favour, but to decide where justice lies; and the oath which they have sworn is not to show favour at their own discretion, but to return a just and lawful verdict... Therefore you must not expect me, gentlemen, to behave towards you in a way which I consider neither reputable nor moral nor consistent with my religious duty.

~ Socrates

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When the law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same.

~ Bastiat

Morality is like the famous fig leaves that Adam and Eve used to cover their genitals after they first sinned. But what morality really covers up is will, which is our true nature.

~ Shai Tubali

Stories are not real life, stories are pieces of morality made entertaining.

~ Matthew Jarpe

Morally it may be better to not kill any creature for their flesh, but biologically, meat was one of the greatest factors involved in the rise of the psychology of thinking humanity.

~ Abhijit Naskar

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.

~ Albert Einstein

Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

~ Steven Pinker