Quotes About Morality

Picture a company that pays its workers the bare minimum, and refuses them health insurance, paid vacation time, and other benefits. Its executives wish for profits, but lasting success cannot be built on the backs of discontented, disloyal, overworked, underproductive employees.

Exert yourself ceaselessly in decreasing evil and accumulating good.

Therefore, pursue your course bravely. Your conscience is at least your own, and to follow it is to be a man; to follow the conscience of another is to be a slave.

The world right now is filled with fog. Honesty is a beacon. Your honesty—saying no to the lying—is what will bring the lost ships home. It's what will bring health, love, and money to you.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

No man is a devil in his own mind.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the niggers is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being ... must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record--everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call now, waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.

Now, one hears from a long time ago that white is merely a state of mind. I add to that, white is a moral choice. It's up to you to be as white as you want to be and pay the price of that ticket. You cannot tell a black man by the color of skin, either. But this is a democracy.

Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures. Of course, they're not any richer than the poor, really, that's why they've turned into vultures, scavengers, indecent garbage men, and I'm talking about the black cats, too, who, in so many ways, are worse.

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt (112)

It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians is you

I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.

From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White

It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

I'm going to have my baby and I'm going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain't going to read to him out of no Bibles and I ain't going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don't drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy.