Morals Quotes

Compromise, while at times morally necessary or at least justifiable, is more often only the first permission for a person (or society) to begin a long downhill descent.

~ Dennis Prager

Buddha wrote a code which he said would be useful to guide men in darkness, but he never claimed to be the Light of the world. Buddhism was born with a disgust for the world, when a prince's son deserted his wife and child, turning from the pleasures of existence to the problems of existence. Burnt by the fires of the world, and already weary with it, Buddha turned to ethics.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A moral judgment of abortion is the usage of a man-made ideology to judge a man-made technology.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I won't sacrifice my characters morals/intentions/motives for the sake of what I believe is right or wrong. If the action fits the character it will be written. That's that.

~ James Desantis

Those with a moral deficit put on a good show, and sleep like a baby.

~ Paul Newman

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

~ Jodi Picoult

Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

~ Russell Kirk

Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.

~ Helen Simonson

You make me a sinner if you stop me giving you hospitality.

~ Idries Shah

Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Immorality sanctified by tradition is still immorality.

~ Bernard E. Rollin

Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them, never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.

~ David Gerrold

Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people - if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are - you may have lost perspective.

~ Tim Kreider

...I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty And Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

~ Philip Roth

Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern he world in the was of peace, decency and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.

~ S. Michael Wilcox

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

~ David Foster Wallace

[At the scene of a murder]The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting--for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way.

~ Shirley Rousseau Murphy

Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?

~ Sue Monk Kidd

I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.

~ Margaret Atwood

How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.

~ Richard Adams

I was only twelve. But I knew how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that was no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long Autumn days of the years past when I carried her books home from school.

~ Ray Bradbury

Death kept waiting for its second course on the kitchen floor, but Amila’s morals struggled to prepare its main meal.

~ Gayendra Abeywardane

The progress of mankind is due exclusively to the progress of natural sciences, not to morals, religion or philosophy.

~ Justus Von Liebig

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,deserves to be whipped.

~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Is lawlessness to be permitted, simply because it is effected with a certain style? Jane, Jane! Where are your finer sensibilities? All o'erthrown, by a man with a golden tongue and a mocking glance?

~ Stephanie Barron

No...No...We don't walk away but when we're holding on to something precious we run. We run away. We run as fast as we can.

~ The Doctor

Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said.“Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

~ Haruki Murakami

But I will never ask anyone from our village-from any village in Tlanth-to risk his or her life unless I'm willing to myself.

~ Sherwood Smith

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.

~ G. Willow Wilson

Some People Are Wise, And Some Are Otherwise.

~ Unknown 9

After breakfast, determined to pass as little of the day as possible in company with Lady Lowborough, I quietly stole away from the company and retired to the library. Mr. Hargrave followed me thither, under pretence of coming for a book; and first, turning to the shelves, he selected a volume, and then quietly, but by no means timidly, approaching me, he stood beside me, resting his hand on the back of my chair, and said softly, ‘And so you consider yourself free at last?’‘Yes,’ said I, without moving, or raising my eyes from my book, ‘free to do anything but offend God and my conscience.

~ Anne Brontë

Don't you think it's good to serve your country?' I asked. 'No, I don't,' Mr Peterson said. 'I think it's good to serve your principles. And in the army you don't get to pick and choose your fights according to your conscience. You kill on command. Don't ever surrender your right to make your own moral decisions, kid.

~ Gavin Extence

Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.

~ Edward Gorey

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men, it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art, it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past.

~ Will Durant

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.

~ C.l.r. James

Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet.

~ Barack Obama

The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.

~ Émile Zola

As we walked home, I knew from far away the trees would've looked nice, the grass would've looked green, and we would've looked like just a couple of boys walking home, armed with Midwest love and Bible Belt morals.But up close, the trees were scorched, the grass was dead, and the boys were on the verge of tears with the belts of those morals tightening around their necks, threatening to hang them if they dared step off the stool of masculinity.

~ Tiffany Mcdaniel