Quotes About Morality

The Vulgar sham of the pompous feast Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest The organised charity, scrimped and iced In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."1 —John Boyle O'Reilly

Byrne, for example, remembered going to confession to 'a great priest, Father Moriarty of South William Street. I told him: "I shot a man, Father." "Did you think you were doing right? Had you no qualms about it?" he asked me. I told him I didn't have any qualms, I thought I was doing right, and he said, "Carry on with the good work," and gave me absolution.

the British position was so untenable morally that they could not use their Army properly and were never able to put forth their full military might.

I remembered going to confession to a great priest, Father Moriarty of South William Street. I told him, "I shot a man, Father." "Did you think you were doing right? Had you no qualms about it?" he asked me. I told him I didn't have any qualms, I thought I was doing right, and he said, "Carry on with the good work," and gave me absolution.

If there is one thing I've learned from the years in the criminal enterprises, it's that anyone can do almost anything to anybody else for any reason, and villainy and treachery doesn't have a thing to do with race, sex, species, or creed.

To some degree, the entirety of human culture and civilization has been built upon survival and death avoidance. From the creation of society and family, to the formation of every religion, to our sense of morality and justice, to our very concept of self-identity and our place in the universe. All of it comes from what little we can comprehend about the wonders of life, and the mystery of death.

Don't confuse fairness with justice. Justice is about doing what is right. Fairness means everyone gets exactly the same thing.

it would be moral to force someone to do something which they would volunteer for if they were a moral person in possession of all of the facts.

When I honor, I don't keep track of it. I don't save it for later as a leverage point to get the other person to honor me. I do it because the behavior is consistent with the person I want to be.

Men, and pigs, are hard on women who sacrifice their virtue, especially for love." Mattis Tannhouser

So you've given away the old good and evil? asked Rose, amazed at all this rare talk from Quick. No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there's no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts.

It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.

After I've preached the last sermon I'll ever deliver, I sit in my Audi with my dad's Bible in one hand and a Glock 17 in the other, contemplating how to get away with a robbery. Soon this gun will make me money, send me to prison or kill me. My life is now that simple.

In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.

Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.

Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.

Religious belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived.

Observing that his penis had a mind of its own — "sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against his will" — led Augustine to theorize that we were born flawed.

A decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.

Don't do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You'll always know.

Our point is, if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, first and foremost, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You're going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don't, and you're not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don't happen to see the world the way you do.

Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell.

so many bad ideas that lead to authoritarian consequences begin with good intentions.

You can tell the true character of a man by how his dog and his kids react to him." "If you don't believe in God, you should believe in the technology that's going to make us immortal.