Morals Quotes

Invoking the moral high ground somehow makes you lose it. Using a secret as a weapon makes you almost as bad as the transgressor.

~ David Levithan

We must know something about malevolence, about how to recognize it, and about how not to make excuses for it. We must know that we cannot expect fair play.That is, perhaps, most crucial of all. Those of us who practice in this field must face the implications of the fact that we are dealing with sexual abuse. Child sex offenders-people who exploit children’s bodies and betray their trust-are not going to hesitate to lie outright. This is obvious but nonetheless frequently seems to catch people by surprise.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998

~ Anna C. Salter

When you feel weak in spirit, think about the agreements you made with yourself about how to live an honourable life. We all have them, but unfortunately the contracts are often written in invisible ink when they should be signed in blood.

~ Suzanne Hayes

One of the biggest contradictions in self-proclaimed open-mindedness is to say that we're all one but when a true bigot comes around tell him we're all different. It's usually the case that neither side is correct. One might have the right to do something, anything, but sure enough, that doesn't mean it's right and a benefit to other people.

~ Criss Jami

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth

~ Patti Smith

Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really

~ Manu Joseph

Of course it is,’ said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everythingthat Alice said; ‘there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moralof that is– “The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.

~ Lewis Carroll

Montaigne said long ago: Were I not to follow the straight road for its straightness, I should follow it for having found by experience that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most useful track. The doctrine of interest rightly understood is not then new, but among the Americans of our time it finds universal acceptance; it has become popular there; you may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try.

~ Sheri S. Tepper

{We} have not to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule, rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can’t.

~ G.k. Chesterton

SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-millionaire, in an age when a million meant something, had been brought to dinner at the rectory by a local landowner who was one of his father's churchwardens. He too had been a big man, affable an easy guest. The fourteen-year-old Adam [Dalgliesh] had been disconcerted to discover during the dinner conversation that he was rather stupid. He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to it possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field.

~ P.d. James

Evolution of mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:

~ Henry Adams

It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.

~ Marcel Proust

He thanked God that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to the world. Saints in heaven - how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime - ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud- dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment-

~ Jack London

...there’s a great deal which I don’t understandin people. In a human being everything should be beautiful: the face, the clothes, the soul, the thoughts. . . .Often I see a beautiful face and clothes, so beautiful that my head gets giddy with rapture; but as for the soul and thoughts,my God! In a beautiful outside there’s sometimes hidden such a black soul that no whitening can rub it off...

~ Anton Chekhov

Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.

~ Martha Gellhorn

If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.

~ Neil Gaiman

Sometimes we punish ourselves the most.

~ William Shakespeare

This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!

~ Leo Tolstoy

I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners.Manners! he said. Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction.

~ Mark Twain

But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome?

~ Carl Sagan

I’m just saying that once that have an excuse, people will do anything. They do what they are told, and they take their money and they think it’s all okay because it’s just their job, while their real self is what happens after work, when they’re bouncing a baby on the knee, or writing poems about snowflakes or whatever.

~ Paul Murray

There is but one rule of conduct for a man: to do the right thing. The cost may be dear in money, in friends, in influence, in labor, in a prolonged and painful sacrifice; but the cost not to do right is far more far more dear: you pay in the integrity of your manhood, in honor, in truth, in character. You forfeit your soul's content and for a timely gain, you barter the infinities.

~ Lucius H. Bugbee

individuals are concerned notwith the moral issue of realizing these standards, but withthe amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression thatthese standards are being realized. Our activity, then, islargely concerned with moral matters, but as performers wedo not have a moral concern in these moral matters. Asperformers we are merchants of morality. Our day is givenover to intimate contact with the goods we display and ourminds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but itmay well be that the more attention we give to these goods,th e more d is ta n t we feel from them and from those who arebelieving enough to buy them. To use a different imagery,the very obligation and profitablility of appearing always ina steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forcesus to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways ofthe stage.

~ Erving Goffman

If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.

~ J. Budziszewski

Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

A folktale without a moral is merely a whimsy.

~ Stephen Sondheim

Modernization, socialization, and progression doesn’t alter nor permit discarding the morals and the laws one should abide themselves too.

~ Avra Amar Filion

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win, and their participants know it.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours – which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life – ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: we can slip them off as easily as we can don them.

~ Parker J. Palmer

Napoleon would always be extremely fastidious when it came to other people's morals, although his own were frequently questionable.

~ Leslie Carroll

Now I was nothing but a shade of grey - my moral compass ambiguous.

~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

~ Oscar Wilde

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

~ Edmund Burke

Flies purify the air, and plays--the morals.

~ Anton Chekhov

What I should do and what I want to do are two opposing forces. I have no idea which way I am going to end up.

~ Ava Zavora

We do the right things at the wrong time because we think we are doing the right thing and the wrong things at the wrong times simply because we want to.

~ Zack Somuyiwa

What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.

~ Jo Nesbø

But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears', for instance, is Never break into someone else's house. The moral of 'Snow White' is Never eat apples. The moral of World War One is Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

~ Lemony Snicket

Dishonesty is like a boomerang. Just when you think all is well, it hits you in the back of your head.

~ Pavan Choudary