Quotes About Morality

you choose to believe what you want, and you choose to do what you do. First comes life, then comes law. You are still responsible. You cannot hide behind anything. Since when does religious tradition permit you to short-circuit any morally uncomfortable decision?

the need for gun control laws and a new moral climate.

Evils that befall the world are not nearly so often caused by bad men as they are by good men who are silent when an opinion must be voiced.

The real inferiority of women to men is shown by their hate of paederasty , which they regard as unfair competition. Men on the other hand rather approve of Sapphism , as saving them trouble & expense. — Aleister Crowley . 1929-03-09 diary entry.

Those laboratory animals have done us no harm. They are tortured and murdered in the name of science. I know, I used to do it myself to my great shame. Is the benefit to humanity worth the sacrifice of so many animal lives? I say, No.

I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?

What is more arrogant than honesty?

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

the object was not to stay alive but to stay human.

a person should not have to choose between doing good and doing well

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.

I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.

You know, women are as promiscuous as men and yet, of course, people are inhibited from having an affair or a relationship because the real-world consequences are a drag.

I don't want to put the world to rights... I just don't like people who put the world to wrongs.

People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.

Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.

The idea ... that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked. We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a whole.

The stinking rich are fucking cheap," Green said. "Which is how they stay rich and why they stink.

Most of the time, it's not whether or not you have a gun in your hand that matters," his father said. "It's what you stand for and how strong you stand for it.

But if we get to the point where more people do not believe in a God than who do believe in God, we will have a hollow legal system - we will have something without heart.