Quotes About Morality

Slavery can never be abolished.

This war no longer has anything to do with knightly conduct or with the agreements of the Geneva Convention.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do - but it does not keep him from doing it.

War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. That's what terrorists are about.

In war, as in politics, no evil - even if it is permissible under the rules - is excusable unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything beyond that is a crime.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president... is morally treasonable to the American public.

My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred.

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

A battle that you win cancels any other bad action of yours. In the same way, by losing one, all the good things worked by you before become vain.

Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

War is indefensible on every grounds, military and economic and diplomatic and also on moral.

War is elevating, because the individual disappears before the great conception of the state... What a perversion of morality to wish to abolish heroism among men!

In firing his gun, John Brown has merely told what time of day it is. It is high noon.

I would never rob your cradles to feed the dogs of war

There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws... What is the difference between the two?...An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

In the Wu Tzu it says: 'He who would save his life shall lose it, and he who would give up his life shall save it.'

It is better to have a war for justice than peace in injustice.

As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

In the gates of Heaven, the war medals are nothing but the evidences of murder!

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war.

We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.