Quotes about Moral Principles

What you are as a person is far more important that what you are as a basketball player.

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

When money and comfort are absent, other more fundamental aspects take on greater importance. Traditions, rules, taboos.

Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done." Benjamin Franklin

Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.

In a state of nature nothing can be said to be just or unjust; this is so only in a civil state, where it is decided by common agreement what belongs to this or that man.

A jurist can obey the letter of the law and violate its spirit, or it can follow the spirit of the law and violate the letter of the law. I want someone who can reconcile the letter and the spirit of the law without partisan leanings.

In some ways, 'decency' is a hazy concept; we know it when we see it.

I would not score very highly on religious value.

The moral principles that have priority in each model appear in the other model, but with lesser priorities. Those lesser priorities drastically change the effect of those principles.

An interesting advantage of restitution is that it does not place you in a moral dilemma with respect to the positive-action and debt-payment principles. You both perform a positive action and you pay your debt. A

Those who based decisions on principle, not some snapshot of public opinion, were often vindicated over time.

On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President, author, scientist, architect, educator, and diplomat

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.

A sixth weakness of relativism is that it allows no room for moral reformers or prophets.

A final objection to relativism is the charge that its central premise, namely that moral absolutes do not exist, is a self-defeating statement, since the premise itself is an absolute.

Morals aren't just for when it's easy, Anita. They aren't morals if you throw them aside every time it's convenient.

I hate cheating. I won't put up with it. I don't do it myself.

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved.

The best is a matter of standards

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.