Quotes About Morality

When this casuistry came to light

Historian D. Michael Quinn refers to the Saints' bald-faced dissembling as "theocratic ethics." The Mormons called it "Lying for the Lord."*

Uncle Rulon has married an estimated seventy-five women with whom he has fathered at least sixty-five children; several of his wives were given to him in marriage when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties.

Podía intentar explicar que se regía por un código de orden superior; argumentar que, como moderno seguidor de las ideas de Henry David Thoreau, había adoptado como evangelio el ensayo titulado Sobre el deber de la desobediencia civil y consideraba que no someterse a unas leyes opresivas e injustas era una obligación moral.

According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.

President George W. Bush, who believes he is an instrument of God and characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.

But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once said, "Righteousness is easy, also cheap, in retrospect." When we condemn posterity for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?

If we did a good act merely from the love of god, and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the atheist?" Jefferson once asked. "It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being exists." Religion, then, could not claim to be the universal source of individual moral conduct.

no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

House. "There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded." That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love.

From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule—one common to the world's religious and moral traditions—has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln's own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," he once wrote. "This expresses my idea of democracy.

Conscience and character were not incidental to human affairs, but instrumental.

The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good.

mother. "Some men call it conscience," she replied, "but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right, but if you turn a deaf ear and disobey it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide." He never forgot the conversation, or its implications.

As Thoreau wrote in his 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience," "Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

King continued: "It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, 'That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.' That's the question facing America today.

In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds

we have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with.