Morality Quotes - Page 11

Like other corrupt people, he would never realize that his punishment was in missing out on what he didn’t know he could have.
Guy Mankowski
And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched him as he watched, gazing where he should not.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.
H.G.Wells
The bottom line, as Raul Hilberg put it, was that most people thought that, even if Jews shouldn't be killed, they weren't worth saving.
Victoria J. Barnett
...the one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts.
David Weber
The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.
Algis Valiunas
Leave it to the Alderaanians to slap a cheery end on a nice little grisly children’s morality tale.
Timothy Zahn
Audiences who behave obscene toward prominent people have no clue that their opinions can result others to have a bad impression on them.
Saaif Alam
. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence.
Saul Bellow
There are no good or evil people. There is only a great, unfathomable mob trampling itself underfoot. The life-giving sources of the old morality have dried up and vanished in the sands of oblivion. There's no other source to draw from, no place to refresh oneself. There is no example, no inspiration. It is night. A night of indifference, apathy, chaos.
Tadeusz Konwicki
If, though full of respect for social conventions and never overstepping the bounds they draw round us, if, nonetheless, it should come to pass that the wicked tread upon flowers, will it not be decided that it is preferable to abandon oneself to the tide rather than to resist it? Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others?
Marquis de Sade
At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality—law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally.
Marquis de Sade
Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending on circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends on class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!
Oscar Wilde
You want to be good. All right, I can understand that. But you have to be careful who you let define your good.
Lois McMaster Bujold
In the early stages the sexual needs will have the upper hand, in later stages the compulsive moralistic inhibition. At times of political upheavals of the total social organization, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality becomes most acute. This will impress some people as the "collapse of morality," other people as "sexual revolution." At any rate, the idea of the "decline of culture" is the perception of the breakthrough of natural sexuality. The only reason why it is experienced subjectively as "decline" is the fact that it threatens the compulsive moralistic way of living. What happens objectively is only the downfall of the sexual dictatorship which maintains the compulsive moralistic forces in the individuals in the interest of authoritarian marriage and family.
Wilhelm Reich
If you live long enough there's no line that you won't cross.
Tracy Manaster
I can see the common people, with their halo of self-defined morality (that changes conveniently based on needs), coin a term for me that I don’t quite approve of – Bitch.
Kavipriya Moorthy
The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land.
Saul D. Alinsky
The state of a moral man, is one of tranquillity and peace; the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest.
Marquis de Sade
Although profanity is part of our language that we speak everyday, it can simultaneity be used as a weapon to demoralize other people if it is offensive within its meaning.
Saaif Alam
I was profoundly impressed by my contact with these places which are and have always been, the wellsprings of your history. It makes one think that the men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of "good" and "evil." Their practical policies were checked against their moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most farsighted and the most salutary. This is true even though in the short term one may wonder: Why all this morality? Let's just get on with the immediate job.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.
Amanda Craig
If an ordinary man can be tapped to be the Messiah...then perhaps any one of us is capable of bringing about the Redemption.
Helen Maryles Shankman
What else could I do? You couldn't just say no. I had to think about...my...position.
Helen Maryles Shankman
Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
Haruki Murakami
My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of 1876–7; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect! The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun. – Do you like the taste of our fruit? – But of what concern is that to the trees? And of what concern is it to us philosophers? . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
E.M. Forster
The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.
Alain de Botton
Any moral ethic worth examining must be universal. That is if something is right or wrong for me, it must also be right or wrong for you. This is a system of ethics that applies universally to all individuals regardless of culture, nationality, race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, wealth, or any other distinguishing feature. Otherwise, we would have difficulty judging human action.
Daniel Alexander Brackins
Morality is part of man and it evolves over time just like the rest of humanity in accordance with Darwinian theory. If we said earlier that man’s evolution depends on change in the natural environment, now we must include the level of freedom of choice in that environment as a factor for change, for it is on this that the condition of morality depends.The higher the level of freedom of choice in society, the more liberal and humanistic that society’s morality will be.
Karmak Bagisbayev
Even though there is neither much altruism nor equality in the world, there is almost universal endorsement of the values of altruism and equality - even, notoriously (and as Nietzsche seemed well aware), by those who are is worst enemies in practice. So Nietzsche's critique is that a culture in the grips of MPS [Morality in the Pejorative Sense], even without acting on MPS, poses the real obstacle to flourishing, because it teaches potential higher types to disvalue what would be most conductive to their creativity and value what is irrelevant or perhaps even hostile to it.
Brian Leiter
It's not respectable,' she said. And when people say that, it's no useanyone's saying anything.
E Nesbit
All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Unorganized morality is called sociability. Organized morality is called civilization. Unorganized immorality is called barbarity. Organized immorality is called statism.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
I know that it is dangerous. I also know that it is right.
A.A. Frias
Lastly, people seemed to think that morality was the same thing as being politically correct, and it wasn't. Some of the most deeply moral people I knew were least politically correct, because they actually worried about good and evil, not just what they were told was good or bad.
Laurell K. Hamilton
We haven't really got anything worth having for our wishes.''We've had things happening,' said Robert; 'that's always something.''It's not enough, unless they're the right things,' said Cyril firmly.
E Nesbit
That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise you can't be sure if you're safe.
James Baldwin
I can never look at these apparent contradictions between the great laws of nature without a feeling of physical uneasiness which amounts to suffering. Were mankind reduced to the necessity of choosing between two parties, one of whom injures his interest, and the other his conscience, we should have nothing to hope from the future. Happily, this is not the case; and to see Aristus regain his economical superiority, as well as his moral superiority, it is sufficient to understand this consoling maxim, which is no less true from having a paradoxical appearance, “To save is to spend.
Frédéric Bastiat
It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do.The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate--even maybe admiring.Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.
Alden Bell
The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.
Paul C. Vitz
Something is objective if it is independent of people’s opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people’s opinions.
William Lane Craig
To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense.
William Lane Craig
The most popular form of atheism is a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism is the view that science and science alone determines what exists. What exists is what our best scientific theories of the world require. If something is not required by our best scientific theories of the world, then it does not exist. But this is devastating for ethics because moral values are not required by science. Science is morally neutral. You cannot find moral values in a test tube. So it follows immediately, from the perspective of naturalism, that moral values do not really exist. They are just subjective illusions of human beings.
William Lane Craig
I saw that morality varies from person to person, from group to group, from nation to nation.And the most interesting thing is that when I began to study history, I realised that morality changes with time. Morality will even shift to its exact opposite when the conditions that once produced it yield to change.When a new set of circumstances appears it is the people with a highly developed sense of individual freedom of choice that first try to change the status quo. More conservative individuals with a less developed sense of freedom resist change for as long as possiblebut give up in the end. Man always has freedom of choice, unlike other creatures, who only change their way of life when they are forced to by the natural environment.Now I understand that the morality which is said to be inherent in God, or, as the atheists prefer to express it, in Nature, naively thinking that replacing the word ‘God’ with ‘Nature’ will make them sound more scientifically convincing, does not exist at all!
Karmak Bagisbayev
How exactly does ‘morality change in time’?”“Morality is part of man and it evolves over time just like the rest of humanity in accordance with Darwinian theory. If we said earlier that man’s evolution depends on change in the natural environment, now we must include the level of freedom of choice in that environment as a factor for change, for it is on this that the condition of morality depends.The higher the level of freedom of choice in society, the more liberal and humanistic that society’s morality will be.
Karmak Bagisbayev
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
Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you.
Gabe Newell
The rule: when energy, 'negative' as it may be, moves without resistance, it easily sublimates and becomes raw energy of power and presence; resistance to it makes it freeze in its current state. For this reason, morality not only does not help our sexuality develop but also forces it to stay as it is.
Shai Tubali
Think about goodness like you think about gravity. Whether or not you believe in gravity, it is still there. Every day you are affected by gravity regardless of how well you understand the physics of it. In this chapter I am asking whether objective morality is something like gravity operating in accordance with the laws of the universe. Are there some things that are always right and some things that are always wrong? Put another way, has there ever been a time in history where it would have been acceptable for Hitler to kill over five million Jews? Or is mass murder always wrong no matter when or where you are? If mass murder is always wrong, then it turns out that objective moral values and duties do exist.
Jon Morrison
The foundation of morality to have done, once and for all, with lying.
Thomas H. Huxley
...she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine, but had instead, a firm reed of goodness.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition - that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by it in favor of any inclination, nay, even of the sum-total of all inclinations... like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself.
Immanuel Kant
They want a hero to worship, and a villain to condemn. They have found their villain today, and they would cherish it for as long as they can, till another one comes along.
Sanchit Gupta
If a criminal was once a saint & a saint was once a criminal, then who is the criminal & who is the saint?
Sanchit Gupta
Greatness should have no victimsGreatness should need no victims.
Haroutioun Bochnakian
Animal rights are not a gift we give to animals. They are a birthright we have taken from them.
Ryan Phillips

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