Quotes About Morality

Rational moral choices are based on the value of life, not a consensus. A consensus can't make the sun rise at midnight, nor can it change a wrong into a right, or the other way around. If something is wrong, it matters not if a thousand other men are for it; you must still oppose it. If something is just, no amount of popular outcry should stay you from your course.

for the right person, either would be a tool. for the wrong person, either could be a weapon of evil. it is the mind behind the tool that matters.

The Second Rule is that the greatest harm can result from the best intentions.

Whoever wins thinks he was in the right. The loser will always believe himself wronged.

Of all the people who came before us, Magda, you were the only one who always represented truth. I want you to know that. - Councilman Sadler

Justice is not the exercise of hatred, it is the celebration of civilization.

Morality comes from the top, such as parent to child. The first step, then, is to set down just laws and show that all of us must live by its maxims. You can never stop all wrongdoing, but if you don't punish it, then it proliferates until anarchy wears the robes of tolerance and understanding.

Don't lay a cloak of guilt around my shoulders because others are evil.

price. There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people. In the best of us there are thoughts or deeds that are wicked, and in the worst of us, at least some virtue. An adversary is not one who does loathsome acts for their own sake.

A civilization must have laws, but there cannot be justice when a man with no conscience metes out sentences without compassion or mercy.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

Steal five dollars and you're a common thief. Steal thousands and you're either the government or a hero.

Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

I DON'T HOLD WITH CRUELTY TO CATS.

But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.

Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn't do good for people, she did right by them.

I tell you, commander, it's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.

Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. and yet... and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!