Quotes About Morality

Nothing human disgusts me . . . unless it's cruel, violent. (spoken by the character Hannah Jelkes)

There are no good or bad people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice.

It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding.

It's not the bad people who are brave I fear, it's the good people who are afraid.

It's not the bad people who are brave I fear, it's the good people who are afraid.

Because life's dictates did not allow for quick and easy distinctions between right and wrong or good and bad. Choices were made between shades of gray, and there was healing and harm to be weighed on both sides of each.

Honesty is never wrong.

Those who committed atrocities always seemed to do so out of a misconceived sense of righteousness and the greater good.

We all struggle with what's right and wrong, Paxon. That's the nature of our lives. We have to figure out what we can live with, and hope that what we do to bring it about doesn't exact a cost that's too high. We have to decide where to draw the line.

What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.

He knew how to tell a lie when it was needed and a greater good would be served.

Stoon savored the memory. It gave him an undeniable satisfaction. There were many others like it, but none that provided such a clear sense of fulfillment. Drust Chazhul had been a monster, bereft of any sense of moral obligation or purpose in life. He had only wanted to achieve power and then hang on to it. Such men were plentiful and always replaceable. Such men needed purging, and when the chance came to remove one, it was an opportunity to be exploited.

You make the choice to use a weapon or not, and your choices will always matter more than the weapon itself, for weapons have a tendency to steal away compassion, empathy, and any consideration of what you

the carefully cultivated moral seriousness—strenuousness might be a better word—coexisted with a fantastical, mrs. jellyby–like absurdity. sontag's complicated and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. the high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of gossip, drollery, and seductive acting out—and, when she was in a benign and unthreatened mood, a fair amount of ironic self-knowledge.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do.

Goodness in the form of innocence can render you a pray to others. In a predatory world , it is not always easy to distinguish virtue from guillibility. This is one reason why there is something quaint as well as imposing about the word 'virtue'.

Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them.

observar que alguns são miseráveis enquanto outros são prósperos é mais ou menos como afirmar que o mundo contém ao mesmo tempo detetives e criminosos. E é verdade, mas isso encobre o fato de que existem detetives porque existem criminosos...

Morality cannot be divorced from power.

What Nietzsche recognises is that you can get rid of God only if you also do away with innate meaning. The Almighty can survive tragedy, but not absurdity.

But it is precisely the fact that they are human that makes what terrorists do so appalling. If they really were inhuman, we might not be in the least surprised by their behaviour.

What I admire about Austen (among hundreds of other commendable qualities) is her traditional rather than modern conception of morality. She sees it, as did Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx, as a matter of public conduct, not as the inner light, interior emotions, what you happen to be feeling, what you find aesthetically alluring, and the like. She's an extremely tough-minded ethical realist in an increasingly corrupt, sentimentalist culture.

Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.