Quotes About Morality

When we feel deprived we try to make it right, and that makes it easier to rationalize our behavior. It's easier to say I need this. I deserve this. But Patanjali says the opposite is true: If we don't take what isn't ours (asteya), we will flourish.

I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

Guilt was for lesser men. A sign of weakness.

Too little temptation can lead to virtue.

He had that basic integrity that is so rare as to be mistaken for altruism.

Sometimes there's just no justice. The bad guys do live, if not happily ever after, then certainly conspicuously.

The guy tells me evil hones in on those closest to redemption.

We're all good when it suits us, he used to say: that doesn't count. It's when you want so badly to do something wrong—when you're about to make a fortune from a dishonest deal, or kiss the lovely lips of your neighbor's wife, or tell a lie to get yourself out of terrible trouble—that's when you need the rules. Your integrity is like a sword, he would say: you shouldn't wave it until you're about to put it to the test.

The Essence and Character of a People, his overriding message was that Judaism is an "eternal countercultural." In his book, Hertzberg declares, "Abraham, the first Jew, is the archetypal Jewish character. As the leader of a small, dissenting minority living precariously on the margins of society, he defines the enduring role of the Jew as the outsider. The recurring themes of Jewish history—otherness, defiance, fragility, and morality—are present in his life.

you cannot have a political solution for a spiritual problem. You must have spiritual solutions for spiritual problems!

End times will manifest: abortion, euthanasia, children carrying weapons, winter and summer will be confused, years months and days will be shortened," Lactantius Epitome of Divine Institutes 71

We are supposed to listen to the voice within us that says, "Gosh, this just doesn't sound loving, even though it sounds correct!" Of course, there's much sorting to be done: what does love really call for in a given situation? Nevertheless, the warning in Scripture is there for a reason.

A third way departs from the "open and affirming" and the "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach by regarding the question of whether and how the biblical prohibitions apply in the case of monogamous gay relationships as a "disputable matter" in the Romans 14-15 sense.

If I say to some kids roughhousing in church, "Don't kill anyone," they know what concern I am addressing. They know I'm exaggerating for emphasis and not speaking in general terms—that I'm not, for example, commenting on the morality of military service. Stripped of the rich context we share, the mere words, "Don't kill anyone" could easily be understood to mean don't kill anyone, anytime, ever.

Humans are, as Sartre put it, 'condemned to be free'. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.

In the opening paragraph Goldi commits felony breaking and entering. Why does she do it? Why does she risk five to ten in the slammer or death by bear claw?

Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken (1949)

But what does a woman expect for her money? Why do we need to first be made to feel comfortable, flirted with, seduced? Why do we need to create the false sense of emotional ties? Why couldn't we just say, okay, that cave over there, we go in, we fuck, hand over some money, and go on with our lives? Why do I feel so guilty? The feeling that I have used and kicked to the curb another human being won't leave me.

Ask any decent person what he thinks matters most in human conduct: five to one his answer will be "kindness."

As goes the family, so goes the faith; as goes the faith, so goes the culture.

The Christian must see God's Law as a guide for his own personal behavior. God's Law is law, not suggestion. It is fundamentally obligatory, not merely recommended.

This idea of "becoming a Jew" indicates ceremonial distinctives are in view rather than moral ones. No one "becomes a Jew" by not killing, not committing adultery, or not coveting (keeping the moral aspects of the Law). They do "become a Jew" by undergoing the ceremonial distinctives which marked the Jews off from the Gentiles (circumcision, food laws, cleansing rituals, and so forth).

Some decry the law as an imposition of religion. But all law imposes religion in that law is necessarily religious, for all law is an expression of morality.

What shall light us to murder & defile if by some chance the Laws of the State happen to get turned off?