Quotes About Morality

He shook his head. "Better to do a small wrong to prevent a big one." "How do you decide what is a 'small' wrong? Let's say, you buy the safety of many with the life of a child. That child means everything to her parents. You devastated them. There is no greater wrong you can do to them. Why would that be a 'small' evil?

Sometimes killing a man wasn't an act of anger or punishment. It was a public service.

The diamonds were lab made. Arrosa had insisted on the real thing, but I refused. Nobody had died digging my earrings out of the ground, and that mattered to me more than what Houston's elite would think.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved .

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.

Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

Dignity is a value that creates irreplaceability.

In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity.

Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.

Immanuel Kant

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

From the crooked timber of humanity, a straight board cannot be hewn.

Settle, for sure and universally, what conduct will promote the happiness of a rational being.

But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector.

Man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end.

Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done

The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence the more often and more steadily one reflects on them, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

never wish to see a just cause defended with unjust means

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing, only, on the other hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself, and is easily seduced.