Quotes About Morality

A singular thing—he was a devout Catholic, went every morning to mass, and kneeled to a merciful redeemer who had said: "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not." Little French children, of course; no little German children!

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn't lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn't think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did.

Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood:...

In all this world, I pray thee, who Is virtuous, heroic, true?

But his desire to do the right thing

Medical journals like The Lancet not only attacked specific fashions, such as corsets or tight-lacing, but also criticized the sex which worships the idol of fashion. Indeed, virtually, any criticism of Fashion rapidly moved into a diatribe on women's vanity and stupidity. Tight-lacing was so ill-defined and the practice apparently so ubiquitous that it seemed to prove all women's mental - and moral - inferiority. Tight-lacing came to stand for everything that was wrong about women.

Tight-lacers were frequently compared to suicides and infaticides, torturers and murderers. They were bad wome, who solicited the lecherous gaze of vulgar men. Specifically, they were bad mothers - at a time in the late nineteenth century when motherhood was seen as women's sacred duty.

I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?

I don't want to be told that it's the people with power over us who are guilty, that we're innocent slaves, that we're not guilty because we're not free. I am free! I'm building a Vernichtungslager; I have to answer to the people who'll be gassed here. I can say No. There's nothing can stop me—as long as I can find the strength to face my destruction.

What does a woman who has lost her children care about a philosopher's definitions of good and evil? But what if life itself is evil?

Informers and stool pigeons are full of virtue, they should all be released and sent home—but how vile they are! Vile for all their virtues, vile even with all their sins absolved...Who was it who made that cruel joke about the proud sound made by the word "Man"?

There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their deaths without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death.

There is only one truth. There cannot be two truths. It's hard to live with no truth, with scraps of truth, with a half-truth. A partial truth is no truth at all. Let the wonderful silence of this night be the truth, the whole truth... Let us remember the good in these men; let us remember their great achievements.

The strength and good sense of the people, their morality, their true wealth—all this will live forever, no matter how hard fascism tries to destroy it.

The morality of the people—this is the measure of free, useful, creative labour.

When you're in war, you don't have to be perfect to be good, you just have to be 51% better than the enemy if you want a moral edge. We in the West have this Utopian idea that we have to be 99.9% good, and if we're not, then we're no damned good. And the enemy knows that.

W naszych rozwa?aniach wyszli?my od podstawowego fenomenologicznego faktu, a mianowicie tego, i? cz?owiek jest bytem ?wiadomym i odpowiedzialnym, a jego ukoronowaniem jest synteza obu tych cech, to jest ?wiadomo?? w?asnej odpowiedzialno?ci.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth...In fact freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

He places placidity above all                And refuses to prettify weapons;        If one prettifies weapons,                This is to delight in the killing of other..

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. (Monseigneur Bienvenu in _Les Miserables_)