Morality Quotes - Page 3

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

She murdered for her truth, and they had died for theirs.

Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.

Ozzy Osbourne

Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable.

Fulton J. Sheen

...all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty... ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

The witness of solid moral character to a righteous way of life must never be underestimated.

Arthur F. Holmes

Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.

Thomas H. Cook

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

Fulton J. Sheen

Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority.

H.L. Mencken

Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies. If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.

John N Gray

Innocence still lives within our hearts and the child within each of us knows right from wrong.

Bryant McGill

Do you keep silent to keep a friendship or do you try to lend your support unconditionally, even if what they are doing goes against everything you believe in? Will it be principles over friendship, morality over love?

Donna Lynn Hope

It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?' 'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.

J.R.R. Tolkien

So you think money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim you product by tears, or of looters, who can take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

Ayn Rand

The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property.

G.K. Chesterton

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?

Joyce Carol Oates

Sustainable change, after all, depends not upon compliance with external mandates or blind adherence to regulation, but rather upon the pursuit of the greater good.

Douglas B. Reeves

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together

Julian Barnes

The moral high ground to which I aspired had turned into a slippery slope.

Alfred Alcorn

The fractured self is not something that needs to be rectified fixed and made whole; by freeing thought of the blinkers of representation, the space of fracture, of multiplicity (as opposed to unity) becomes a powerful place and one from which the most radical ideas can emerge.

Ria Banerjee

Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.

Émile Zola

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Oscar Wilde

I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol.

G.K. Chesterton

Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.

Marcus Aurelius

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later.

Steven Pinker

People today...it seems they are good, or sometimes evil, mostly by inertia, not by choice.

Brandon Sanderson

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

Arthur Miller

Don't judge me. Ethics and morality no longer exist in our world. It's a luxury of the past, afforded only to those who had a future.

T.M. Williams

Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.

Hermann Hesse

The modern mind is like the eye of a man who is too tired to see the difference between blue and green. It fails in the quality that is truly called distinction; and,being incapable of distinction, it falls back on generalisation. The man, instead of having the sense to say he is tired, says he is emancipated and enlightened and liberal and universal.......we find it less trouble to let in a jungle of generalisations than to keep watch upon a logical frontier. But this shapeless assimilation is not only found in accepting things in the lump; it is also found in condemning them in the lump. When the same modern mind does begin to be intolerant, it is just as universally intolerant as it was universally tolerant. It sends things in batches to the gallows just as it admitted them in mobs to the sanctuary. It cannot limit its limitations any more than its license....There are...lunatics now having power to lay down the law, who have somehow got it into their heads that any artistic representation of anything wicked must be forbidden as encouraging wickedness. This would obviously be a veto on any tragedy and practically on any tale. But a moment's thought...would show them that this is simply an illogical generalisation from the particular problem of sex. All dignified civilisations conceal sexual things, for the perfectly sensible reason that their mere exhibition does affect the passions. But seeing another man forge a cheque does not make me want to forge a cheque. Seeing the tools for burgling a safe does not arouse an appetite for being a burglar. But the intelligence in question cannot stop itself from stopping anything. It is automatically autocratic; and its very prohibition proceeds in a sort of absence of mind. Indeed, that is the most exact word for it; it is emphatically absence of mind. For the mind exists to make those very distinctions and definitions which these people refuse. They refuse to draw the line anywhere; and drawing a line is the beginning of all philosophy, as it is the beginning of all art. They are the people who are content to say that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and are condemned to pass their lives in looking for eggs from the cock as well as the hen.

G.K. Chesterton

Hollywood-Nobody's impressed by anybody because they're all too consumed with trying to cover up their own shortcomings. Hollywood is a microcosm of a world of lazy moral ideals and social indifference where every man is trying to convince himself he's a king.

J. Matthew Nespoli

Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it.

Alexander McCall Smith

Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up. Washing one's hand didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection.

Iain Banks

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

Nancy Pearcey

By telling lie you can hide the truth, but u can't reject it.

Munendra Dwivedi

But if you take pleasure in morality, then you are always in deficit.

Brian Castro

He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. ‘This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don’t let it get complicated. Gray it ain’t. It’s black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.

Charles Martin

Humans are not a commodity, nor is our humanity. Fight to save the lives of those who can not save themselves, and in turn, you will have saved your soul.

L.M. Fields

In comparison, young unmarried women in America were fortunate: They had a certain measure of sexual freedom. Eighteenth-century parents allowed their daughters to spend tie with suitors unsupervised, and courting couples openly engaged in "bundling," the practice of sleeping together without undressing, in the girls' homes. (Theoretically, that is, they were sleeping together without undressing: in fact, premarital pregnancy boomed during the period of 1750 to 1780, when bundling was nearly universal.) But by the turn of the century, in a complete reversal of previous beliefs about women's sexuality, the idea took hold that only men were carnal creatures; women were thought to be passionless and therefore morally superior.

Leora Tanenbaum

It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.

John Williams

If a man says he is Christian, yet he has no problems knocking you up, having premarital sex or living in sin with you, then you have to ask yourself, “What version of Christ does he believe in?

Shannon L. Alder

I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.

Barry M. Goldwater

I have attended church regularly since I was less than a week old. I've listened to sermons about virtue, sermons against vice. I have heard about money, time management, tithing, abstinence, and generosity. I've listened to thousands of sermons. But I could count on one hand the number of sermons that were a simple proclamation of the gospel of Christ.

Rich Mullins

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.

Mohsin Hamid

But the Dark cannot claim what Light does not surrender.

C.L. Wilson

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.

Viktor E. Frankl

We are against ignorance. We feel that you have to educate yourself, no matter what the situation is. People who refuse to educate themselves - people who refuse to find out what something is about, that they're frightened of - find comfort in being ignorant.”--Zeena Schreck Interview for KJTV-1990

Zeena Schreck

I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born. But he alone can take over the freedom of men who appeases their conscience. With bread you were given an indisputable banner: give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience - oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience. In this you were right. For the mystery of man's being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him. That is so, but what came of it? Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it still more for them! Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond men's strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all - and who did this? He who came to give his life for them! Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it and forever burdened the kingdom of the human soul with its torments. You desired the free love of man, that he should follow you freely. seduced and captivated by you. Instead of the firm ancient law, men had henceforth to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him as a guide - but did it not occur to you that he would eventually reject and dispute even your image and your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice? They will finally cry out that the truth is not in you, for it was impossible to leave them in greater confusion and torment than you did, abandoning them to so many cares and insoluble problems. Thus you yourself laid the foundation for the destruction of your own kingdom, and do not blame anyone else for it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

Oscar Wilde

But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a bit before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.

Bret Easton Ellis

The state is concerned with the promotion of outward righteousness arising from the individual being constrained to keep the law. The Gospel alters human nature, whereas the state merely restrains human greed and evil, having no positive power to alter human motivation.

Reformation Thought

[I]t is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Zizek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis - the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those’ abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure - since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible… But this impasse - it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic - is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals - but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-asubject: Capital.

Mark Fisher

We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people...So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog.

Ronald Knox

Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how to speak well; the other how to act well.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole — rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of ‘moral’ argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications.

Terry Eagleton

If children instead of adults would have contolled the world, then the world would have become a better place.

Abrar Ahmed chowdhury

There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.

Henry David Thoreau

If I am disobeying orders, I'd rather be with God against men than with men against God.

Aristides de Souza Mendes do Amaral e Abranches

The sign of a good conscience is for a man to be in support of basically everything that Westboro Baptist isn't.

Luke Myer

It is morally appalling for the so called liberators of South Sudan to keep liberating their own people from a war that has already been won.

Duop Chak Wuol

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Morality Quotes - Page 3

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