Quotes About Morality

I love when the environmentalist David Orr says, "The planet does not need more 'successful people.' The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane, and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture defines it.

Courage not aligned with a higher good isn't always positive—a burglar can be plenty courageous as he robs you blind.

All must answer for their deeds eventually

Because cruelty is made easier by hypocrisy and self-deception, they are bound to stand high on the list of vices that begins with cruelty.

One acts with dignity," he said, "as much as one may. One compromises only as much as one must, and still remain oneself. And one keeps one's pride, even if one must keep it in secret, where only God can see.

All along you could have done one thing. One thing simpler than al the rest. You could have told the truth about how you felt. Publicly. You could have stood up and said This is happening and it's wrong.

All along you could have done one thing. One thing simpler than all the rest. You could have told the truth about how you felt. Publicly. You could have stood up and said This is happening and it's wrong.

He might have been a thief and a liar and a cheat, but he was a good person.

And a weak person will find it easier to take what someone else has earned rather than risk working hard and achieving something on his own.

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

I have no religion,' says Borneau, 'but I respect the religion of others. Religion is sacred.' Why this privilege, this immunity?... A believer creates God in his own image; if he is ugly, his God will be morally ugly. Why should moral ugliness be respectable?

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

Seit wir den Glauben und damit die Wahrheit verloren haben, liegt zwischen Heuchelei und Ehrlichkeit der letzte Unterschied, der uns bleibt.

Religion ist nichts anderes als die Lehre davon, wie man frei von Erkenntnis gehorcht [...].

D]ie spezielle Müdigkeit, die jeden befällt, der sich anhören muss, was gut und böse, richtig und falsch sei, obwohl niemand mehr die Grundlagen dieser Unterscheidung zu erklären oder auch nur zu benennen vermag. Moral dient der Herbeiführung von Berechenbarkeit.

een maatschappij waarin het er alleen nog om ging om tijdens de grote uitverkoop van waarden en normen de eigen schaapjes op het droge te krijgen.

Es gibt Gebiete des Denkens, die man nicht ungestraft betritt. Kopfschmerzen und ein schlechter Charakter sind der Mindestpreis.

D]ie Urenkel der Nihilisten [...] Was, wenn ihnen Bibel, Grundgesetz und Strafrecht nie mehr gegolten hätten als Anleitung und Regelbuch zu einem Gesellschafsspiel? [...] Wenn wir ihre Gründe nicht mehr verstünden, weil es keine gibt?

Es [gibt] vielleicht pragmatische Urteile, nicht aber pragmatische Gerechtigkeit.

D]er wahre Träger von Grausamkeit im Menschen [ist] die Unschuld.

Seiner Erfahrung nach wurden die schlimmsten Übel auf der Welt nicht durch böse Menschen bewirkt. Von denen gab es in Wahrheit erstaunlich wenige. Viel gefährlicher waren Leute, die sich im Recht glaubten. Sie waren ungeheuer zahlreich, und sie kannten keine Gnade.

We always learn to be virtuous in a given context; there is no such thing as just learning to be generous or loyal in the abstract.

One school of ancient philosophers, the Stoics, developed a distinctive view of Medea as part of their ethics and psychology. They think that the idea that there are really two distinct forces or motives at work in Medea is an illusion. What matters in this situation is always Medea herself, the person, and it is wrong to think in terms of different parts of her.

A virtue is a disposition which is central to the person, to whom he or she is, a way we standardly think of character.