Quotes About Morality

Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.

Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive.

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.

Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

When the right person does the wrong thing, it's the right thing.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

SavaÅŸ fotoÄŸraflar?nda güzellik görmek, kalpsizlikle eÅŸ anlaml? say?lmaktad?r.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

That being said, one person's "barbarian" is another person's "just doing what everybody else is doing." (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America.

Hakk?n ve hakl?l???n bir tarafta, bask? ve adaletsizliÄŸin diÄŸer tarafta yer ald???na ve kavgan?n sürdürülmesi gerektiÄŸine inananlar aç?s?ndan önemli olan, tam da kimin, kim taraf?ndan öldürüldüÄŸüdür.

Just being a good person doesn't necessarily entitle you to a good life.

It? You mean preserving a zygote or blastula or whatever? That's their moral obligation? Not their obligation to a living, breathing woman who just got raped?

the administrator was known to be an extreme antichoice activist who insisted that a ball of cells the size of a garbanzo bean should supersede the will of a living, breathing woman.

We die when we refuse to stand up for justice.

Yet we ought to kill someone!' said the gentleman, immediately reverting to his former subject. 'I have been quite out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.

Weber warns that "he who seeks the salvation of the soul, his own soul and others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics.

The man who willeth to do well... we should extol his virtues and speak not of his faults behind his back.

The same is true for the market economy: the power of markets is enormous, but they have no inherent moral character. We have to decide how to manage them... For all these reasons, it is plain that markets must be tamed and tempered to make sure they work to the benefit of most citizens. And that has to be done repeatedly, to ensure that they continue to do so.