Morality Quotes - Page 17

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

Ludwig von Mises

What was it that Granny Weatherwax had said once? "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things". And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family.

Terry Pratchett

To know the good from the bad, measure the heart. Actions reveal the true coloring of one's heart, not their intentions.

If government played by the same rules as the rest of us, it would cease to be government.

Sheldon Richman

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Be very careful when you judge another human being. Do not measure anybody strictly based on the bad you see in them and ignore all the good. Be wary of any man who intentionally ignores another man's record of deeds or work history simply to impose their own agenda. Such a man's judgment lacks merit and should be disregarded immediately. Without a conscience, there is no truth in them.

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.

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.

They call good evil and evil good. There are those who are so easily offended that they lose their ability to ever discern any truth, and this is often derived from a sort of frenzy by way of their own masked prejudice.

It isn't the evil and indecent who are flung down into the depths, no! Oh, no! The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.

Andrzej Sapkowski

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

The flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side.

Terry Pratchett

The intellectual climate of the 1970s, for which the 1950s had already paved the way, contributed to this. A theory was even finally developed at that time that pedophilia should be viewed as something positive. Above all, however, the thesis was advocated-and this even infiltrated Catholic moral theology-that there was no such thing as something that is bad in itself. There were only things that were "relatively" bad. What was good or bad depended on the consequences. In such a context, where everything is relative and nothing intrinsically evil exists, but only relative good and relative evil, people who have an inclination to such behavior are left without no solid footing. Of course pedophilia is first rather a sickness of individuals, but the fact that it could become so active and so widespread was linked also to an intellectual climate through which the foundations of moral theology, good and evil, became open to question in the Church. Good and evil became interchangeable; they were no longer absolutely clear opposites.

Pope Benedict XVI

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America's peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the 'lesser evil.' This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, 'lesser evil' is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today's Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton's bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright's veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism—the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it—is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than 'cowboy' language.

Christopher Hitchens

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

Anthony Burgess

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

Theodor W. Adorno

Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.

Glen Cook

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

Glen Cook

There is a difference between what is wrong and what is evil. Evil is committed when clarity is taken away from what is clearly wrong, allowing wrong to be seen as less wrong, excusable, right, or an obligatory commandment of the Lord God Almighty.Evil is bad sold as good, wrong sold as right, injustice sold as justice. Like the coat of a virus, a thin veil of right can disguise enormous wrong and confer an ability to infect others.

Evil can't be scientifically defined: it's an illusory moral concept that doesn't exist in nature. Its origins and connotations have been inextricably been linked to religion and mythology.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.

Christopher Golden

If you say there is no such thing as morality in absolute terms, then child abuse is not evil, it just may not happen to be your thing.

Rebecca Manley Pippert

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

T.S Eliot

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

Martin Luther King Jr.

If you pursue this road that you've embarked upon, you will eventually come to moral decisions that will take you completely by surprise

Cormac McCarthy

If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: man's lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness.

The conscious attempt to be a good person without Christ is as legalistic as an attempt to make it into Heaven through empty religiosity.

It is neither just the religious, the spiritual, the power-hungry, the evil, the ignorant, the corrupt, the Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Jew, nor the atheist that makes a hypocrite, but being a human being. Any man who thinks himself to be free of hypocrisy while committed to cherry-picking others for such, I am confident, the Almighty can prove to him a great deal of his own hypocrisy even beyond his earthly comprehension.

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

Flannery O'Connor

Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.

H.G.Wells

Oh no!’ replies Monsieur Tuvache indignantly. ‘We’re not murderers, you know. You have to understand that’s prohibited. We supply what is needed but people do the deed themselves. It’s their affair. We are just here to offer a service by selling quality products,’ continues the shopkeeper, leading the customer towards the checkout.

Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.

J. Budziszewski

Don't tell a lie to be loved, speak the truth to be hated.

Michael Bassey Johnson

As an inmate of a concentration camp, Corrie Ten Boom heard a commotion, and saw a short distance away a prison guard mercilessly beating a female prisoner. “What can we do for these people?” Corrie whispered. “Show them that love is greater,” Betsie replied. In that moment, Corrie realized her sister’s focus was on the prison guard, not the victim she was watching. Betsie saw the world through a different lens. She considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer.

Terryl L. Givens

To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.

Isidor Isaac Rabi

Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible.Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity.Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil.

Charity: begins at home and remains there. When it goes out, it's because it wants to brag about itself

Bangambiki Habyarimana

One of the things about Ike that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn't leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.

I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not to be disturbed – and also because I think that the world doesn’t need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller’s cordiality. Not to do good, because I don’t know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.

Fernando Pessoa

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away.

Mahavira

You think you're superior to the others, don't you? We'll you're not. In fact you're worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.

If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government,

But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.

Kindness defines my morality.

Debasish Mridha M.D.

Find out the difference between ethics and morality, but never forget to be kind.

Debasish Mridha

Morality is societal, but kindness is universal. Be kind even if it not always ethical.

Debasish Mridha

Morality without kindness is the most dangerous weapon.

Debasish Mridha

Morality is good when we use it to live our lives but not to hurt anyone.

Debasish Mridha

Follow your own morality but never forget to be kind. Kindness is always better than morality.

Debasish Mridha

Often morality defines our inner philosophy.

Debasish Mridha

Morality is often very immoral.

Debasish Mridha

Is it a small thing to quench the flames of hell with the holy tears of pity -- to unbind the martyr from the stake -- break all the chains -- put out the fires of civil war -- stay the sword of the fanatic, and tear the bloody hands of the Church from the white throat of Science? Is it a small thing to make men truly free -- to destroy the dogmas of ignorance, prejudice and power -- the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the beautiful face of the earth the fiend of fear?

Robert G. Ingersoll

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?

Arthur Schopenhauer

Morality without kindness and compassion is very dangerous.

Debasish Mridha

The darker side of Nietzsche’s ideas was incorporated into the Nazi belief system. Part of the link was straightforward: some things Nietzsche said were pure Nazi doctrine. His comments that ‘The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction’ and that ‘the tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate’ could come from any work on racial hygiene. Nietzsche’s central contribution was not these explicitly Social Darwinist views, but his rejection of the Judeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak. Self-creation required hardness towards oneself: a strong will imposing coherence on conflicting impulses. It also requires hardness on others. Conflicts between the self-creative projects of different people made inevitable the attempt to dominate others. The whole of life was a struggle in which victory went to the brave and to the strong-willed. Noble human qualities, linked with the will to power, were brought out in combat but atrophied in peace. Compassion was weakness, cowardice and self-deception. The Judeo-Christian emphasis on it was poison. In drawing these consequences from his beliefs about the death of God and from Social Darwinism, Nietzsche provided the part of the Nazi belief system which ‘justified’ the cruel steps they took to implement their other beliefs.

Jonathan Glover

Those moral laws on which all human excellence is founded—a love of truth in ourselves, and a sincere sympathy with our fellow-creatures.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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