Quotes About Morality

serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone alter and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it.

The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how 'people of faith' possess moral advantages that others can only envy.

he was praised from the clouds for showing his sturdy willingness to murder an innocent in expiation of his own crimes.

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

One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions, or barred from committing them, but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.... If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Christopher Hitchens

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. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven't had a reply yet.

La vida es azarosa e injusta, y el pecado, por muy original que sea, queda generalmente impune.

We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.

the strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good.

Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found

the gore-soaked landscape of the Old Testament.

Bask? uygulayan çoÄŸunluk kötü olduÄŸuna göre, der liberal kiÅŸi, demek ki bask? gören grup sütten ç?kma ak ka??k olmal?d?r. Bu nas?l bir saçmal?kt?r, fark?nda m?s?n?z? Kötünün kendisinden daha kötü olanlar taraf?ndan bask? alt?na al?nmas? olmayacak ÅŸey mi? Arenadaki bütün H?ristiyan kurbanlar aziz mi olmal?lar?

This feature of Israelite law stands in sharp contrast to many ancient law codes where certain thefts by certain people were punishable by death. Indeed, it contrasts with British law until fairly recent times (people were hanged for sheep-stealing in Britain until the nineteenth century). On the other hand, as mentioned above, theft of a person for gain (kidnapping) was a capital offence in Israel (21:16; Deut. 24:7). Stealing a human life was different from stealing property.

Legalism at one extreme (keep all the rules) and license at the other (reject any rules) are both completely wrong answers to the question of how Christians should live.

Good and bad are just constructs people use.

Our dead deserve to be honored, Phlox." "But do we really honor them by using them as an excuse to add to their numbers?

In real life, as opposed to pluralist fantasy, every moral and cultural choice of any consequence rules out a whole series of other choices. In an age of images and ideology, however, the difference between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly elusive.

Virtue is the fount whence honor springs.

Stipendium peccati mors est.

What virtue is it that is born with us? Much less can honor be ascribed thereto, Honor is purchased by the deeds we do. Believe me, Hero, honor is not won, Until some honorable deed be done. ----From "Hero and Leander, Sestiad I

She knew it should bother her more, being evil and all, but after she put on a little mascara and some lipstick and poured herself another cup of blood-laced coffee, she found that she was okay with it.