Quotes About Morality

We have to realize what we are. The range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as if they somehow do not belong to our species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.

The Buddha encouraged people to "know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong. And when you do, then give them up. And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them." The message is always to examine and see for yourself. When you see for yourself what is true-and that's really the only way that you can genuinely know anything-then embrace it. Until then, just suspend judgment and criticism.

Property being theft and all, I felt free to help myself.

Undead isn't inhuman!")

The right thing to do and the hard thing to do are usually the same.

The right thing to do and the hard thing to do are usually the same thing."

Their holiness didn't have a thing to do with what they did or didn't do.

C.S. Lewis was right when he said, "Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.

Everybody cheats. I just didn't know.

Before he even arrived, he sent each top police official a framed, hand-embroidered motto: Police Unto Others As You Would Have Them Police Unto You. What did that mean? Don't arrest anybody because you wouldn't like to be arrested?

A corollary of this has been that Christians have thought that they should only create art with a Pollyanna quality to it: paintings of birds and kittens, movies that extol family life and end happily, songs that are positive and uplifting – in short, works of art that show a world that is almost unfallen where no one experiences conflict and where sin is naughty rather than wicked.

I've been hearing about how good and kind and merciful that old boy is upstairs, but I've read the Old Testament. You just take a look at all the folks that Jehovah decreed needed to burned or sacked and smited out of their homes. That old fellow is a psychopathic serial killer, you just check the facts.

Political philosophy is the study of the deepest, most intractable, and most enduring problems of political life.

They're worth being scared of," I said. "They'd kill without a second thought." "I hate to say this, Boss, but so would you." "Yeah, but I'm a nice guy.

Law is a reflection of society, justice is a reflection of an idealization of that society.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.

One thing we've learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.

But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.

He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity - the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us. But if that is too dire , let's call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.

Oh, measure it all out! Acceptable levels of misery and suffering!' The cane swung down, thumped hard on the ground. 'Acceptable? Who the fuck says any level is acceptable? What sort of mind thinks that?' Karsa grinned, 'Why, a civilized one.' 'Indeed!' Shadowthrone turned to Cotillion. 'And you doubted this one!

Justice without compassion was the destroyer of morality, a slayer blind to empathy.