Quotes About Morality

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

In war, good guys always become bad guys.

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?

the atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides.

Capital punishment could not be justified in any society calling itself civilized.

My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run, the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Jefferson's personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died).

The poet Archibald MacLeish, then an Assistant Secretary of State, spoke critically of what he saw in the postwar world: As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief . . . without moral purpose or human interest. . . .

A Yale professor of military history, Micheal Howard, writing in the New York Times )January 28, 1991) quoted the military strategist Clausewitz approvingly: The fact that a bloody slaughter is a horrifying act must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity.

Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a matter of biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author said: "If you do, you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution." A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if they were "high spirited not prudent.

the prayers of those who hold religion in one hand, and

I ain't gonna kill; it's against my will. . . .

it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

To define it is to condemn it. It violates the Golden Rule. As Abraham Lincoln is said to have replied to a pro-slavery argument, 'What is this good thing that no man wants for himself?

Yet to read into the past the morality of our time (or the lack of it) may not make the historian's task any easier.

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

There may be flies on you and me, but there are no flies on Jesus.

With apologies to Austin Ruse and the National Review, it's passages like this, not any endorsement of the drug-fueled, last-minute allnighter, that explain why Hunter Thompson will always be celebrated by young people. It had nothing to do with drugs, the F word, or being cool, and everything to do with the fact that Thompson never lost his sense of appropriate outrage, never fell into the trap of accepting that moral compromise was somehow a sign of growth and adulthood. Both

Any lawyer who says there's no such thing as rape should be hauled out to a public place by three large perverts and buggered at high noon, with all his clients watching.

Dans une société bloquée où tout le monde est coupable, le seul crime est de se faire prendre. Dans un univers de voleurs, le seul péché défintif est la stupidité.

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.