Quotes About Morality

But if there be an hereafter,And that there is, conscience, uninfluenc'dAnd suffer'd to speak out, tells every man,Then must it be an awful thing to die;More horrid yet to die by one's own hand.

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone's feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.

Men are not angels, neither are they brutes.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so; life's business being just the terrible choice.

That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.

There's just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hidy to 'em. Even then, they ain't worth the bullet it takes to shoot 'em.

Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this.

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.

Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause - nor any charter of immunities and rights.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.

Some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.

Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He'll be as dumb as if his lips were stone.

If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

If man looks within himself he must perceive two things: a law of right, and that which it condemns.

The Bible does not profess to make men omniscient, but simply to tell them enough to make them happy and good, if they will believe it and live up to it.

Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations.