Quotes About Morality

Let us remove God from the equation, shall we?

stories of evil can be projected on them with as little difficulty as stories of good.

How many sentences have I seen more criminal than the crime…

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice

if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And when we cease to grow, we begin to die.

For law can be just or unjust. Dr. Huey P. Newton said, "The law must serve men; not men serve the law." John Africa, founder of the MOVE Organization, said, "Just because it's legal doesn't make it right.

O where shall I find a virtuous woman, for her price is above rubies.

I had a sense he was offering things abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or coitus interruptus

The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher and a monal pheasant for allowing a doubt about His existence to enter the mind.

We are not men of hate, but we must be men of justice.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

When u are small, u can choose which way to grow. If you are kind and decent, you grow into a kind and decent man. And if you are like El Patron . . . Just think about it." – Tam Lin

When you're small, you can choose which way to grow. If you're kind and decent, you grow into a kind and decent man. The idea that if you were mean, you might stay mean forever had never occurred to him.

You get used to being evil.

Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing then anything? ...The question gaped beneath her, but she didn't try to evade it. I don't know. I just know we do.

The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability. In other words, economics was never separable from "identity politics," certainly not in colonial nations like the United States—so why would it suddenly be today?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke out strongly against war profiteers, saying, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.

As the political scientist Michael Wolfe puts it, "Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well." He adds, "As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster."30

Simone de Beauvoir, writing on the same subject, concurred: "To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."24

No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine

we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous, since they imply that there is an acceptable price for allowing entire countries to disappear, for leaving untold millions to die on parched land

Was I starting to feel evil? Yes, now I was worrying I'd be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.

She says it's too easy to call people evil instead of their choices and that lets people justify making evil choices. Because they convince themselves that it's okay because they're still good people overall inside their own heads. And yes, fine. But I think that after a certain number of evil choices, it's reasonable shorthand to decide that someone's an evil person who oughtn't have the chance to make any more choices. And the more power someone has, the less slack they ought to be given.