Morality Quotes

what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves

~ José Saramago

Most men who very seldom say a moral thing, very seldom do a wrong thing. Their immorality is simply a pose, an image that serves to differentiate them from the ‘morally perfect masses’. And as opposite to it, most men who very frequently say a moral thing, very frequently do a wrong thing. Their morality is simply a mask in order to gain the respect of the masses.

~ Elmar Hussein

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

~ Hierocles

Always polish the dirt for a refreshing start and seek out to build new mental structures that can help you to become rejuvenated.

~ Saaif Alam

I appreciate life so much after I see people die. It is always just such a reminder that every moment -- this is all we have. This is it. I don't know if there is anything before or after, but this is what we do know. This is it. There are no guarantees for anything else. So we have to always, always appreciate.

~ Phil Zuckerman

Mankind's first sin gave us the ability to know both good and evil. Our subsequent sins make us increasingly unable to tell the difference.

~ Ron Brackin

Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: ‘Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred.

~ Jonathan Glover

Part of the Maoist project was the deliberate construction of a new moral identity. To do this it was necessary to destroy people’s previous sense of who they were and to make sure there was no room for it grow back.

~ Jonathan Glover

In recent philosophy there has been a growing awareness of the gap between the abstract principles proposed by philosophers and the ways in which people actually think. The kind of rationality admired in the theory of knowledge is idealization. In the real world people have to act on beliefs often based on fragmentary and unreliable evidence.

~ Jonathan Glover

Now I realize, of course, that many readers will acknowledge that we do in fact have these reactions, but would nevertheless write them off as mere reactions. “Our tendency to find something personally disgusting,” they will sniff, “doesn’t show that there is anything objectively wrong with it.” This is the sort of stupidity-masquerading-as-insight that absolutely pervades modern intellectual life, and it has the same source as so many other contemporary intellectual pathologies: the abandonment of the classical realism of the great Greek and Scholastic philosophers, and especially of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes.

~ Edward Feser

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished, the others can only be hurt.

~ William Ernest Hocking

Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.

~ H.l. Mencken

Morality is what the queen expects from the hive, not from herself.

~ Marty Rubin

Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.

~ G.e. Moore

If i am asked 'what is good? my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it

~ G.e. Moore

We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Secret of man's Mortality, Man has transformed from immortal to become a mere mortal being all because of our mental love for sex and evil.

~ Auliq Ice

Atrocities are easier to commit if respect for the victim can be neutralized. For this reason, humiliation handed out by those with power can be ominous. The link between humiliation and atrocity is often found.

~ Jonathan Glover

Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.

~ Jonathan Glover

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

~ Joan Didion

When we observe oppression, let us develop strategies that free not only the oppressed but also the oppressor. Let us remember that those who use their power to deny freedom to others are also imprisoned and are also worthy of care. Do not let their unjust actions inspire us to cruelty, or else we will soon become what we set out against.Here is our challenge: let us take up the miseducation of justice-making, by stripping our minds of the idea that equity can be manifested through condemnation, through humiliation, through shame and blame, and through righteous vindication. No, justice-making begins by marrying a just thought to insightful words, inviting us to collective action, by daring to free both the oppressed and the oppressor, for we know what it is like to be both.Stand we must, stand strong and bold. But let us choose a new way to balance the scales. Rather than shoving our foot on oppressors’ necks, let us instead reach out a hand, offer a seat, and show them, and even ourselves, a new way of justice-making by collectively experimenting with the moral imagination.

~ Nathan C. Walker

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

~ Henry David Thoreau

The young now approached love in the way they approached success and consumption and the future itself: with an underlying assumption of abundance. They expected more out of love than earlier generations did and were willing to fight to secure it, but when it failed they were equally at ease in walking away. It was one strike and you're out. They rejected the moral vocabulary of an older generation: patience, tolerance, adjustment.

~ Anand Giridharadas

...if good is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such definition.

~ G.e. Moore

Good, then, is indefinable....

~ G.e. Moore

For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them.

~ G.e. Moore

We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.

~ G.e. Moore

The reality is that in many countries torture of the most revolting cruelty happens routinely, often under the auspices of governments with good relations with Europe and the United States, sometimes using equipment knowingly supplied by Western companies. There is little reason to think torture is in retreat. The festival of cruelty is in full swing.

~ Jonathan Glover

In its report issued that year, 1991, Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over fifty countries, the protest to thirteen countries making specific reference to torture. These are the kinds of thing many of us have a vague background awareness of, without there being much publicity unless the perpetrators are some currently loathed regime, or unless some highly visible Westerner is among the victims.

~ Jonathan Glover

A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, “Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it?

~ Jonathan Glover

Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the President, the many political and military advisers involved in the decision, who killed the people of Hiroshima? No one seems to have felt that the responsibility was fully his.

~ Jonathan Glover

That's because you're a highly moral person. I'm not. I don't judge, not even myself.

~ Philip K. Dick

I come only to ask a simple question. Is Muad'Dib's death to be followed by the moral suicide of all men? Is that the inevitable aftermath of a Messiah?

~ Frank Herbert

A moral foreign policy means your positions on certain matters are clear no matter what, and that you won't forget about them when it's convenient.

~ Garry Kasparov

A person who has a criminal mind and would be punished by the referees and they will remain in isolation from others as an opportunity for them to reform. When he or she get released from his or her referees' custody, he or she would have a better understanding about the ethical and moral values of his or her society and not make the same mistake again.

~ Saaif Alam

The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.

~ James S.a. Corey

The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.

~ Jonathan Glover

When we see something different, we judge them either bad or good. But when see something similar we take it as a norm. So does it justify that morality is the epitome good or bad, or vice versa.

~ Syl

as long as agreat number of those impressions which form character, like the nicemotions of the arm, remain absolutely independent of the will of man,though it would be the height of folly and presumption to attempt tocalculate the relative proportions of virtue and vice at the future periodsof the world, it may be safely asserted that the vices and moralweakness of mankind, taken in the mass, are invincible.

~ Thomas Robert Malthus

I know the difference between right and wrong. I understand the rules. But today I feel that the rules have been blurred, because today they were literally on my front doorstep.

~ Cecelia Ahern