Quotes About Morality

He knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech.

The message that President Obama delivered in his speech at Notre Dame was: morality is immoral. Pro-life is the extremist position, not a moral position. Yet we should compromise and work to reduce abortions. Where's the compromise between life and death - and why work to reduce the number of them occurring if there's nothing wrong with them?

In 1984, I gave a speech at Notre Dame titled 'Religious Belief and Public Morality.' I said that Catholic legislators will live by the laws of the church because we want to stay in the club.

Indulgence in frivolous speech not only reveals one's lack of moral character, but it deprives him of good qualities also.

Sin is still sin - no matter how you spell it.

It's really interesting to play someone you wouldn't want to ever spend more than a couple of drinks with - but who has redeemable characteristics.

Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free, and only a free person can make responsible choices - between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking.

Politicians are addicted to spending and revenue extraction. As with an addict, there's little pause for moral or legal contemplation.

Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Those machines have no place for empathy. There's billions of dollars being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy.

The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

The mind must first reflect upon itself in order that it may frame a rule of Justice, and not be inclined to do to another what it would not have done to itself, nor refuse to another what it desires for itself. These two assuredly comprise the whole sphere of Justice.

To me, its seems necessary to rediscover - and the energy to do so exists - that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man's heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

Now, myself, I'm not a pacifist at all. I believe in just war. I would have joined the spirit of the nation to fight against apartheid.

Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.

The good guys in my movies mind their own business, and they don't judge other people. And the bad guys are jealous; they judge other people without knowing the whole story. They want all the attention, and they're mean spirited.

It's up to us, the people, to break immoral laws, and resist. As soon as the leaders of a country lie to you, they have no authority over you. These maniacs have no authority over us. And they might be able to put our bodies in prison, but they can't put our spirits in prison.

We are all afflicted with our own spiritual blindness. That's what sin does to us, and we all sin. We would do better to look into our own hearts and deal with our own sin before we condemn the sins of others.

I am not a religious person, but I am spiritual. But I don't believe in things like guilt.

I think where political issues invade moral situations, spiritual leaders have to speak out.

Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.

It depends on how it is done but what we are drifting into, which is that people grow up without any sense of a spiritual dimension to life, is just impoverishing.

We would, however, perform an injustice to the bourgeois women's rights movement if we would regard it as solely motivated by economics. No, this movement also contains a more profound spiritual and moral aspect.

Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual.