Quotes About Morality

When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as 'nonjudgmental.' For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.

That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

ideology that 'gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilised men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilised men have done worse than nothing—they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians.

Most men and women must suppress the good within them to be evil; just as, to be good, they must suppress the evil. There is no final victory of one or the other. Indeed

But life is not a matter of double-entry book-keeping. No number of years in prison can be equivalent to the torture and killing of children: if it were, the term could be served in advance and the person who served it would be entitled to commit his crimes on his release.

The prevention of evil will always require more than desirable social arrangements: it will forever require personal self-control and the conscious limitation of appetites.

We should remember that there are few pleasures greater than promoting your moral enthusiasms at other people's expense.

ideological aim: to subvert the very concept and deny the possibility of virtue, and therefore of the necessity for restraint.

There are few illicit pleasures greater than that of causing pain to others for their own, or some higher, good.

By attempting to tackle the sources of supply rather than those of demand, it will sidestep the question of an entire way of life—a problem that it would take genuine moral courage to tackle—and aim at an easy target instead.

This is the first time in history there has been mass denial that sexual relations are a proper subject of moral reflection or need to be governed by moral restrictions. The result of this denial, not surprisingly, has been soaring divorce rates and mass illegitimacy, among other phenomena. The sexual revolution has been above all a change in moral sensibility, in the direction of a thorough coarsening of feeling, thought, and behavior.

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

My basic principle is that you don't make decisions because they are easy you don't make them because they are cheap you don't make them because they're popular you make them because *they're right*.

All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance.

Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the highest kind comes from a religious stock.

The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.

Knowing what's right doesn't mean much unless you do what's right.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.