Quotes About Morality

Even good people are obliged to deceive.

I know in war good people can feel obliged for good reasons to do things they would normally object to and recoil from.

Attacking innocent people is always obscene.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

Obscenity comes from grime.

I don't know how one actually would define obscenity. I'm sure the definition is different according to the age one is living in.

I believe it's worth observing terrible things people have done as clearly and rationally as we can to show that our monsters are not caricatures.

Consequently it will often happen there will be a desire of particular objects, in cases where they cannot be obtained without manifest injury to others.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

Something happened to the State of Israel. What was morally obvious in 1948 is not so obvious anymore. When the State of Israel was established, it was, for the parents and grandparents of these young Jews, a miracle. It was David and Goliath. We were the just cause. It was about values. We were small, but we were the good guys in the world!

The moral case for gender equality is obvious. It should not need any explanation.

Obviously everybody is accountable for their own actions, and everybody has to make judgments based on their own conscience as to whether or not they believe what they were doing is right or wrong.

Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right.

I'm a Christian, and those beliefs occasionally come out in the books.

Occasionally the conflict between 'what we stand for' and 'what we do' has been forthrightly addressed.

I did this movie, 'A Walk Among the Tombstones' - I truly play a horrible, horrible individual in that - and I would occasionally go to the theater and watch what people's responses were, and they would laugh. He makes jokes, and people would respond to him in a human way. Then I've really done my job if I've humanized a really horrible person.

You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're . . . you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it.

I won't stay in with married men any more said the wise girl they're too agreeable, it's a little too much like curling up with the good book. You mean a good book Oh, dear, did I say the good book sighed the witch.

The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.

In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.

This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war.

A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.

He had been certain that religion was there for a very good practical reason. It couldn't be simpler—you had to keep the weak and unruly in order. But a man of pride (such as himself) could do as he chose.

This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war. Why, Brigham Young with his countless wives pining on the vine had the gall to state that if you discovered one of your women in adultery, it would behoove you as a good and Christian act to hold her on your lap and run a knife through her breast. That way she'd have her whack at the hereafter.