Quotes About Morality

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.

The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—every ten out of ten —he'll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack's what's behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building.

In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks.

Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

Inhuman, V says. But that's an easy word. We've been doing that sort of thing to each other all through history, back past the Pyramids. Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

Their moral position in converting from slave holders to champions of freedom was about like a house cat on a cold night scooting through a closing door just before the latch clacks shut. But sometimes timing is all. A brief moment of history, less than a deep breath, becomes the difference between inside and outside.

I've had relatives so crooked they nearly went to prison, but if you have money you never actually go. They make you think it for a while, and that's your punishment.

Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse. Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light

the philosopher Karl Popper and his ally Ernst Gombrich, wrote many critiques of the zeitgeist and argued that although there is no such thing as historical inevitability, there most certainly is a 'logic of the situation and climate of opinion', and morality consists in resisting those pressures when they are socially negative. In architecture this syndrome became the alliance of mass production with mass urban renewal, cheap housing and overcrowding.

Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever

Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be. Remember.

the age in which the Romish Church had made marriage a legalized tyranny, and the laity, by a natural and pardonable revulsion, had exalted adultery into a virtue and a science? That all love was lust; that all women had their price; that profligacy, though an ecclesiastical sin, was so pardonable, if not necessary, as to be hardly a moral sin

Most of us still believe to-day, that [history] is not merely concerned with the stringing together of facts in their correct order and the reconstruction of annals, but with something more. We must draw the moral . . . [W]e yet hold that history has its lessons, and that they can be discovered and taught. 'The experience of the past', as Stubbs wrote, 'can be carried into the present: study gives us maxims as well as dry facts.

the word murderer, let me put it another way. We are not sinners because we have committed sins. We sin because we are sinners. The

the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

I don't have a license to kill, but I don't have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;

Hate the sin, love the sinner: it's hard to stay pissed off at someone for doing something wrong if you know you'd have done exactly the same thing if you'd been standing in their shoes.)

a man cannot make himself believe a lie just because it profits him. Men

So Ah'm no evil, Ah'm just plain bad.

Some knowledge is inherently corrupting

A certain Herr Schurz, a Prussian politician, once said: 'My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.