Quotes About Morality

Religions, moral systems, her own included, wee like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great ditance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to judge?

It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy.

Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel.

Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.

But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

Instead, she found her argument in the "doctrine of necessity," an idea established in common law that in certain limited circumstances, which no parliament would ever care to define, it was permissible to break the criminal law to prevent a greater evil.

Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character's growth.

self-interest and kindness were best not separated

Celor ce nu-È™i pot lua gândul de la o nedreptate li se întâmpl? uneori s? suprapun?, în minte, dorinÈ›a de revan?? cu sentimentul unei obligaÈ›ii morale.

All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?

Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to

There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought.

In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.

A country overwhelmed by evil has more dignity than one tripped up by fools.

Never in my life have I had the thought that I was going out to fight in order to inflict defeat on somebody. Rather, I've always gone out to protect what was rightfully mine.

Serán necesarios largos años, escribe Václav Havel, antes de que los valores que se apoyan en la verdad y la autenticidad morales se impongan y se lleven por delante al cinismo político; pero, al final, siempre acaban venciendo. Ésta debe ser también la paciente apuesta del verdadero periodismo.

I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.' David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 19381

one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.

Did those nice church ladies come by again? He nodded. I asked them if a man died and then the woman remarried, and then the three of them met in heaven, would it be a sin for them to have a threesome, since they were all married in God's eye. And they decided they were late to be somewhere else.

You see, the mailman saw your husband during one of his walks. He's my fiancé, I told her. We are living in sin. Heather blinked, momentarily knocked off her stride, but recovered. Oh, that's nice. It's very nice. I highly recommend it.

The concepts of right or wrong are always consequential. It can't be situational or it's not right or wrong.

The only way to make sure that the Hand didn't get to you would have been to kill your brother. I could've done it, but I didn't. I just gave him some drugs. You gave an addict in rehab drugs, and you want credit for it? Of course it sounds bad when you put it that way.