Quotes About Morality

Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.

Sin is geographical.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Morality in sexual relations, when it is free from superstition, consists essentially in respect for the other person, and unwillingness to use that person solely as a means of personal gratification, without regard to his or her desires.

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair. In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.

No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

no one ever gossips about the virtues of others

Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.

There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.

Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said thou shalt not, and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code.

The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

A philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything other except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.

We need a morality based upon love of life, upon pleasure in growth and positive achievement, not upon repression and prohibition.

There are a great many ways in which, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering.

Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social Life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.