Quotes About Morality

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

Where there is no vital community to hold up precious ethical and religious ideals, there can be no coming to a moral commitment—only personal accomplishment is applauded.

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

racial reasoning discourages moral reasoning.

What are stories for if we don't learn from them?

It's the same in real life: Notorious murderers get off scot-free and live happily all their lives, while good people die - sometimes the very best people. That's the way of the world.

Wir sind alle Lügner, wenn es uns nützt.

In fairy tales, the heroes are punished when they run away from a task. The heroes, not their younger brothers...

Why do you want to tie them up?" inquired Farid. "Why not kill them? That's what they were going to do to us!

I think she'd sell her soul to the devil without thinking if he offered her the right book for it.

I hate that, I said. It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?

We're not making a world without greed, Jacob. We're making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn't mean you don't get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.

Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint." He swallowed. "No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn't just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day.

There's more than one way to be smart. People like my dad assume that because they're smart about being evil bastards, they're smart about everything—

I was willing to bet that if I were a dude coming back to the Sofitel late at night with a couple of underage hookers, no one would bat an eye, state of emergency or no state of emergency. But let a lady try and show some sisterly solidarity, and suddenly it was ENFORCE ALL THE POLICIES. Fuck that.

People like my dad assume that because they're smart about being evil bastards, they're smart about everything—" "And because they're smart at everything," Seth said, "that makes it okay for them to be evil bastards?

He ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up. He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't going to go there.

I don't think that the average person is sixty percent good and forty percent prick. I think that the average person sometimes kids himself that he's the center of the universe, and it's okay if he does something that he'd be pissed about if someone else did it to him, and tries not to think about it too hard.

That's the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you're a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else's taking and giving, you're a creep scorekeeper. It's our version of Christian guilt—it's impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you're doing right.

Blowing them up or shooting them wasn't right, but a world in which the wicked went about their days frightened of retribution was a more just one than a world where the wicked held their heads high.

It's our version of Christian guilt—it's impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The

I wonder how often evangelical Christians in today's world have completely inverted these priorities, kowtowing to the overly conservative, judgmental insiders and blasting away at the non-Christian world for not adhering to Christian morality. Yet how can we expect non-Christians to pursue Christian morality when they do not have God's Spirit within them, the Spirit who alone makes such obedience possible?

If I made you from nothing, then maybe I am God, and because I want More, maybe I'm the Devil.

God doesn't want us to be happy when it causes us to do something wrong or unwise