Quotes About Morality

The Death Star had destroyed an entire planet. Yes, it had been a rebel hotbed, a positive nest of treason. But surely not everyone who had died had hated the Empire. The destruction of the Death Star hit closer to home, as she had lost people she knew, but at least there had been no civilians on it. No children.

Honesty shakes the foundation of civilization.

she had no money, and she had to live with a man who fancied himself a public character and a moralist of a very saintly type. The moralist said mice brought germs and so she was obliged to chase the mouse and all its fellow guests. Nevertheless, although she despised animals, she felt involuntarily that the little marauder was much like herself, trying to get by: she belongs to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.

The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.

All around him the chanting swelled, Harm no one, harm no one. What the hell did that mean? He was going to have to shoot the poor son of a bitch, but maybe that was a far better way to go than what the house of horrors had planned. This was a hell of a way for men to die, even if they deserved it.

Who is this idiot, Jess? He's willing to kill you and rape a woman, but doesn't want to hurt a minor. Is he kidding? Criminals have to have some standards, baby. Jess sounded amused.

Bottom line, dolce core, that's who I am. When the cops can't do something to protect citizens, it's my turn. You have to decide if you can live with who I am. The real me.

You're a good man, Vittorio. No matter what, you're a good man.

Never had any trouble distinguishing between a varmint and a gentleman. Where I come from, we get rid of the varmints.

There is an ethics of perception. Theories are not simply forms of perception. When practised they become ethical decisions.

We no longer whip people through the streets. Instead we send them to executive-level open jails for a few months' R&R before they hire PR teams to restore their reputations. Fraud, perjury, perverting the course of justice count as nothing

These hippie writers are selfish and irresponsible. I'll tell you what made our nation the bastion of patrician morality it is today: the ability to be profoundly miserable. It's one of our greatest strengths, to be ranked beside shutting the boozers at ten-thirty and regarding the waterproof mackintosh as an acceptable item of clothing.

Yes, he wanted to do the right thing, but perhaps this time the right thing was something different.

Remembering was pointless; but forgetting somehow seemed immoral.

There is a special place in hell for people who bring children into this world solely for the sake of seeming better than they are.

The lesson of the biblical tale of Noah's ark was a simple one, a refrain that echoed throughout the Old Testament: Behave, or God will fuck you up.

Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving as if they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

As Shakespeare put it in 'King Lear,' the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.

I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.

Once we assume a creator and a plan, it makes humans objects of a cruel experiment whereby we are created to be sick and commanded to be well.

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)

Divine permission, given to people who think they have god on their side, enables actions that a morally normal unbeliever would not contemplate.