Quotes About Morality

Lies are a precious currency—you have to be careful how and where you spend them.

Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you're no longer a soldier. You're just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.

He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.' 'Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he's unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.' She flinched. 'You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—' 'Four.' I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. 'I'm talking about four isolated incidents. And that's just this year.

The cost of contemplating history is often an uneasy conscience.

Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue.

Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren't going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height – even if it was only the illusion of a view – wasn't so bad.

wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.

Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls.

But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.

Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It's just a phase, they would insist. You'll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life--and truth, and morality, and art--far more clearly than our compromised elders.

If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. —

Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable

You realize that you want official interference into other people's lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible.

He found himself reflecting on questions of honesty. Personal honesty, artistic honesty. How they were connected, if indeed they were. And how much of this virtue anyone had, and how long that store would last. He had told friends that if ever he repudiated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, they were to conclude that he had run out of honesty

No existe la justicia, ni aquí ni en ninguna parte.

In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of the father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.

What if Susan, from religious or moral scruple, had discouraged his interest, and taught him nothing more than tactical astuteness when playing mixed doubles? What if Macleod had continued to hold a sexual interest in his wife? None of this might have happened. But given that it had, then if you wanted to attribute fault, you were straight away into prehistory, which now, in two of their three cases, had become inaccessible.

Ich kenne den hochmoralischen Ton nur zu gut, den die rotnasigen Alkoholiker unter den Journalisten so gern anschlagen, wenn sie sich über die Fehltritte der Großen auslassen.

She would certainly allow John to give himself the credit for turning her head and luring her into sin—all men like to feel they are leading the dance—but the truth was that if Susan had not made the decision to go astray, it would not be happening.

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad. Good and evil do not exist.

Others went further: on one of Stanley's expeditions, James Jameson, heir to an Irish whiskey fortune, bought an eleven-year-old girl so he could sketch her being dismembered and eaten.