Quotes About Morality

Do not use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'

Nothing leads to good that is not natural.

The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.

I don't think I'm naturally a good person. I think some people have an innate goodness to them, and I am sort of proud of the fact that I kind of keep myself in check, probably because I have awesome parents.

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.

A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin pointed out, elevates and even celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful, and violent.

Starbuck is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab's "impious end, but feel that I must help him to it." "But he drilled deep down," Starbuck exclaims, "and blasted all my reason out of me!"53 Moral cowardice like Starbuck's turns us into hostages

Many ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil," Berkman wrote. Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable.

A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.

It is impossible to defy "radical evil"—a phrase originally coined by Immanuel Kant to describe those who surrender their freedom and morality to an extreme form of self-adulation and later adopted by Hannah Arendt to describe totalitarianism—without "sublime madness.

But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.

Identities and morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores, rules, and authenticity mean nothing. Good and evil mean nothing. The idea of permanent personalities and permanent values, as in the culture at large, has evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood.

Karma is Tao's response to the sum of your actions.

Living your life authentically means living your life being true to what is highest and best within you without misrepresentation.

La vertu de ren, que l'on traduit par « humanité », est centrale dans la morale confucéenne.

La philosophie répond moins à la question de la nature des choses (la science se chargera de cette « physique ») qu'à celle du bien-vivre.

Persons in their most developed form are conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending centers of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who—as the efficient cause of their own responsible actions and interactions—exercise complex capacities for agency and inter-subjectivity in order to sustain their own incommunicable selves in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the non-personal world.

You can't say it's a fair way to determine right or wrong one day, and then say it's unfair the next because you don't like the outcome.

Fear makes people do cruel things, things they'll be ashamed of later

There is no shame in fear, Orgrim and Durotan. Only in letting fear prevent you from doing the right thing.

I have no fear of killing those who deserve to die. I do not choose to kill those who do not.

I don't want to be part of mass murder

It is difficult enough for me to understand how one or two may become so corrupted that they would doom their descendants for power in their lifetimes; that there were so many—the number is not even known for certain—is beyond the scope of my limited imagination.

You always take the high road, Master Kenobi," said Desh.