Quotes about Moral Principles

When you are able to maintain your own highest standards of integrity - regardless of what others may do - you are destined for greatness.

Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.

Cracking the safe (excerpt) A poor man must swing For stealing a belt buckle But if a rich man steals a whole state He is acclaimed As statesmen of the year . . . Moral: the more you pile up ethical principles And duties and obligations To bring everyone in line The more you gather loot For a thief like Khang. By ethical argument And moral principle The greatest crimes are eventually shown To have been necessary, and, in fact, A signal benefit To mankind.

Good manners and good morals are sworn friends and fast allies.

The rewards and punishments of the moral laws of nature therefore require additional supports. Something else is needed, and that something else comes in two forms: first, there are social sanctions, or what Locke calls "the law of opinion or reputation"; and, second, there are civil sanctions that Locke designates as "civil law."52

Strain not the laws to make their tortures grievous.

The critical issues here concern what is right, what is just -- not the balancing of benefits.

The maintenance of high standards of behavior in nonviolent action is necessary at all stages of the conflict.

Morality starts as a simple concept and becomes complicated.

What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example...even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.

You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Combine common sense and the Golden Rule, and you will have very little bad luck.

The great hope of society is individual character.

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.

I lost agents and managers because I turned down big movies that were smutty.

I like to live righteous. And I just want everyone to know I'm not trying to get out of anything.

Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war.

What I am is a proud humanist. Atheism says what I don't accept, humanism says what I do." - Nathan Phelps

Your choice can either violate a spiritual principle of love or walk in it

how people can cherry-pick ethical rules to fit their actions.

People who are not morally independent tend to fit ethics to their profession, rather than find a profession that fits their ethics.

Success is leading an honorable life. Honor implies that there are some actions you would categorically never do, regardless of the material rewards. It also means that there are things you would do unconditionally, regardless of the consequences.