Quotes About Morality

Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism.

Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference).

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad?

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.

dinin gerçekten de kötü etkilerinden biri, anlamadan tatmin olman?n bize bir erdem olduÄŸunu öÄŸretmesidir.

With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Atheists don't have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you've heard the cynical witticism 'Conscience is knowing that someone is watching'.

No society has ever survived or will ever survive without morality, and no morality has ever survived without a transcendent source."19

These days, I no longer believe there ever are truly good guys or bad guys in war, at least in the Middle East. They're generally shades of gray. But that doesn't translate well on television. It was too complicated. Too remote.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

Virtue is virtue, and, like suffering, it is inexplicable, irreducible, unintelligible.

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest—and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura—and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.

He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying.

Suffering is not virtue, nor does it make virtue, nor does of it virtue necessarily flow.

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result—ruthlessness in political life.

Morality is as much an art as a science, and it calls for a certain versatility from us, the ability to improvise and respond to actual circumstances and particular situations.

We are not concerned with the morality of the Dreadnought. Her purpose was always ugly and wicked, and she was, like any weapon of violence, a symptom of man's baser characteristics.

If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.

Heinrich Himmler declared: 'Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.

The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.

No such thing as time travel, he'd rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you've done, and try in the future to do what you're happy to live with.