Quotes About Morality

If only you were half so good as he! He sins no sins but gentle drunkenness, Great-hearted mirth, and kind adultery.

Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my country when I remember that god is just.

Religion poisons everything

while courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. 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.

obrar siempre de manera que podamos convertir la máxima de nuestra conducta en ley universal».

Christopher Hitchens

Es que quiere evitar el mal y es incapaz de hacerlo? Entonces, es que es impotente. ¿Es que puede, pero no quiere? Entonces es malévolo. ¿Es que quiere y puede? Entonces, ¿de dónde proviene el mal?6

I have met many brave men and women, morally superior to myself, whose courage in adversity derives from their faith. But whenever they have chosen to speak or write about it, I have found myself appalled by the instant decline of their intellectual and moral standards. They want god on their side and believe they are doing his work--what is this, even at its very best, but an extreme from of solipsism?

Corruptio optimi pessima: no greater cruelty will be devised than by those who are sure, or are assured, that they are doing good.

Cuanto peor es el infractor, más devoto resulta ser.

When priests go bad, they go very bad indeed, and commit crimes that would make the average sinner pale.

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.

No creo en la inmortalidad del individuo, y considero que la ética es una preocupación exclusivamente humana que no está respaldada por ninguna autoridad sobrehumana.

Orwell's] very ordinariness is the sterling guarantee that we need no saintly representative consciences. We would do better to make sterner use of our own.

Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Of course, the most flagrant offenders against morality and common sense are still the nihilistic pseudo-leftists, who claim to see no real difference between Western democracy and those who desire to murder its voters at random.

Estamos seguros de que se puede vivir una vida ética sin religión. Y de hecho sabemos que el reverso es cierto: que la religión ha ocasionado que innumerables personas no solo no se comporten mejor que otras, sino que se concedan licencias para comportarse de formas que dejarían estupefacto al regente de un burdel o a un genocida.

This revulsion is innate in any healthy person, and does not need to be taught.

ground)—"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"—has entered our literature and our consciousness. This episode

it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity

La idea de la tortura es tan antigua como la maldad de la humanidad, que es la única especie con la imaginación suficiente para suponer el daño que se puede ocasionar cuando se le inflige a otro. No podemos culpar a la religión de este impulso, pero podemos condenarla por institucionalizar y refinar la práctica.

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It's not moral to lie to children. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.

The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.