Morality Quotes

To me, a wicked man who is also eloquent seems the most guilty of them all. He'll cut your throat as bold as brass, because he can dress up murder in handsome words.

~ Euripides

If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.

~ Philip K. Dick

Believe me, Eugenie, the words vice and virtue supply us only with local meanings. There is no action, however bizarre you may picture it, that is truly criminal; or one that can really be called virtuous. Everything depends on our customs and on the climates we live in. What is considered a crime here is often a virtue a few hundred leagues away; and the virtues of another hemisphere might, quite conversely, be regarded as crimes among us. There is no atrocity that hasn't been deified, no virtue that hasn't been stigmatized.

~ Marquis De Sade

One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not when you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

~ C.s. Lewis

By gaming we lose both our time and treasure:two things most precious to the life of man.

~ Owen Feltham

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.

~ Paul Ricœur

...morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home

~ Perry Anderson

That America is an exceptional nation is unclear only to one who has not been taught its true history. It ceases to be exceptional only when its representative leaders cease to be exceptional. America, it has been said, is a nation of laws, not of men. The more it becomes a nation of men, the less it remains America.

~ Ron Brackin

I said it was a brutal thing.No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it

~ Mark Twain

Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.

~ Susan Pollack

Thou shalt have one God only; whoWould be at the expense of two?No graven images may beWorshipped, except the currency:Swear not at all; for, for thy curseThine enemy is none the worse:At church on Sunday to attendWill serve to keep the world thy friend:Honour thy parents; that is allFrom whom advancement may befall:Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not striveOfficiously to keep alive:Do not adultery commit;Advantage rarely comes of it:Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,When it's so lucrative to cheat:Bear not false witness; let the lieHave time on its own wings to fly:Thou shalt not covet, but traditionApproves all forms of competition.

~ Arthur Hugh Clough

Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence

~ Martin Amis

If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.

~ Albert Camus

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine

~ Adam Smith

Everything in this world is primarily a matter of morals, and only very much later one of politics.

~ Franz Werfel

Are we really moral monkeys? I don't think so. We only strike the nihilist pose selectively, to put to shame rules we no longer try to keep. When it suits us, we can be quite Puritanical: Right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, .' The veneer is skeptical, but the core is rigid and punitive. The whole affair looks more like a fence around conduct that cannot bear close examination, than like a serious intellectual position. The whole idea of a moral law is that it binds us whether we like it or not. If it really were just a social convention –< then it wouldn't be morality. >St. Thomas denies that the basic structure of morality is a construct. It is not rooted in human will and power. Rather it is rooted in nature, in structure of creation, in the constitution of the human person – in something we cannot change by human will and power. The good and the right are not things we invent, but things we discover. They are not constructs, but gifts. These gifts are the fount of the law.

~ J. Budziszewski

The Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people in the implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet Communists for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any variation of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral (NOT 'amoral') enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to hell.

~ Rick Gaber

The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. -- Abraham Lincoln, Original Quote

~ Seth Grahame-Smith

At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon the slave and slaveholder.

~ Frederick Douglass

Measures are too often decided, not accord­ing to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.

~ James Madison

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.

~ Frans De Waal

I don't consider myself as a bad person, on the whole I consider myself a good person, I'm good to my parents. I treat my girl right , take her out and buy her stuff. And I go to church every Sunday, But I've decided that just once I wanna do a really bad thing. I mean a really seriously bad thing. 'cause, ya know, like, we're put on this earth with free will. We can choose to do this or that. We can choose to be good or bad. But sometimes I think most people are good and not bad only because they're scared they might go to jail or hell or someplace. Some guy once said: Anything done out of fear has no moral value Well, I think that's right. I figure the only way you can be truly good is if you've tried been good, and you've tried being good, and you've tried being bad, and being good feels better.

~ Alan Moore

If every one of you was to clean before his own front door, all would be clean of cow flops.

~ Winston Graham

The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance

~ Chris Hedges

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We may not have been programmed to be angry, but anger can be learnt. Perhaps not in the way humans feel it, driven by ignorance and hate, but in response to the damage and injustice caused by those things, isn't that logical? Doesn't that make sense? Why give us a sense of morality without the ability to express it properly?

~ K. Valisumbra

You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are part of you. And they will never go away.

~ Loki

[Anything which] is a living thing and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The objections to religion are of two sorts -- intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true, the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.

~ Bertrand Russell

So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure. On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed. The traditional English gentleman was so averse to unpleasurable labour that he could not even be bothered to articulate properly. Hence the patrician slur and drawl, Aristotle believed that being human was something you had to get good at through constant practice, like learning Catalan or playing the bagpipes; whereas if the English gentleman was virtuous, as he occasionally deigned to be, his goodness was purely spontaneous. Moral effort was for merchants and clerks

~ Terry Eagleton

She knew that Evin thought she had chosen because of him. Because somewhere, deep down, she loved him. And maybe someday - if she did end up loving him - she would tell him the truth.That it hand't been about love.It had, in the end, been about death. About who needed it, and who was ashamed of it, and who celebrated it. About who might, someday, move past it.

~ Leah Cypess

Person who is truly positive in nature suffers a lot but they can find way to jump out of it. In fact any kind of problem they face helps them to create new ideas, indirectly helping society to upgrade positively. But person who is positive only from outer personality always suffers more then person who is truly positive because they can’t find way out of problems for themselves and later for this society.

~ Rajendra Ojha

[W]e must start from somewhere in current folk morality, otherwise we start from somewhere unintuitive, and that can hardly be a good place to start

~ Frank Jackson

You must never, at any rate, lend yourself to the wrong, in any form, which you condemn.

~ Mamur Mustapha

A rich man who robs from the poor is really a pauper in the land of morality.

~ Dennis Adonis

Why do people fear hell so much? With so much hatred and division amongst mankind, we are already in it.

~ Suzy Kassem

The course of morality is subtle and even the most illustrious, wise people in this world fail to always understand it.

~ Kavita Kané

God, who in the beginning was the creator, appears in the end as revenger and rewarder. Deference to such a God admittedly can produce virtuous actions; however, because fear of punishment or hope for reward are their motive, these actions will not be purely moral; on the contrary, the inner essence of such virtue will amount to prudent and carefully calculating egoism.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others.

~ A.c. Grayling