Quotes About Morality

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.

The anti-life of [Jerry Falwell] proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.

This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale

And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Montaigne: "Religion's surest foundation is the contempt for life.

My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever.

History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.

Ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men

Si me convierto será porque es preferible que muera un creyente a que lo haga un ateo.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn't have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points.

Virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of - indeed is not even an argument for - the truth of his belief.

But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap.

because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—

One feels almost laughably heavy-footed in pointing out that Mrs. Clinton's prim little book, It Takes a Village, proposes sexual abstinence for the young, and that the president was earnestly seconding this very proposal while using an impressionable intern as the physical rather than moral equivalent of a blow-up doll.

Christian America" that cares for people before they are born and after they are dead but is only interested in clerical coercion for the years in between

Orwell was one of those upon whom nothing was lost. (This included, as Orwell himself said: "the power of facing unpleasant facts"). By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage..

But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap. It is also a form of discipline.

And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought.

Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.

A high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act?

The argument about ethics and morality will have to go on in a post-religious society, just as it had to go on when religion was regnant and was often ordering good people to agree to evil things such as torture, slavery, or cruelty to children.