Quotes About Morality

I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.

The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn't the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn't even that. Or maybe it is collectively, he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.

Patricia Highsmith

Her insan cinayet iÅŸleyebilir. Durumlara baÄŸl?, yap?yla hiç ilgisi yok. KiÅŸi s?n?ra kadar gelir bazen-barda?? ta??ran damlada, tamam. Kim olursa olsun. Ninen bile iÅŸler. Bilmez miyim?

How was Frank ever going to achieve the big justification, which would take away all his guilt? He might never find a total justification, but he had to find an attitude. Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive attitude or self-destructive attitude.

He would rather the man be a pervert than a police officer

I know what I'd do in the matter, but I'm a dedicated villain. -Roland Otton

the best thing that can happen to anyone who is doing wrong is to be found out. If he is not found out he will do more wrong and earn a heavier punishment.

What you do to your enemies today, you will do to your friends tomorrow.

Here is one of the most surprising facts about the Civil War: Lee believed that slavery was wrong, and had freed his own negroes long before the conflict came; but Grant's wife owned slaves at the very time that her husband was leading the armies of the North to destroy slavery.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Once I did bad and that I heard ever, twice I did good, but that I heard never.

We have all read the golden rule and the Sermon on the Mount. Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.

There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to "make it." But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart?

The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do and who to be.

The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.

The spiritual side of the human being, Christian and non-Christian alike, develops into the reality that it becomes, for good or ill.

if you sufficiently dismember yourself, you will not be able to do any wrong action. This is the logic by which Jesus reduces the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees to the absurd.

men of the modern world exist in a continual and flagrant antagonism between their consciences and their way of life."1 There

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, "hell to pay." That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.

Consider a daily newspaper or television newscast and eliminate from it every report that presupposes a breaking of one of the Ten Commandments. Very little will be left.

But what is true of Christianity in its inception and history is true of other religions as well. They all present themselves as providing knowledge of what is real and what is right. To think otherwise is to falsify the very nature of religious consciousness and religious life

One has to feel strong revulsion toward the wrong feeling one now has or is likely to have and at the same time strong attraction to good feeling that one does not now feel.

under their influence, and that of a few less significant developments in psychology, the human being has been increasingly taken to be the kind of thing that could not be a subject of moral knowledge. That is because, in such views, the human self (if it even exists, which has been strongly denied) is governed by unconscious forces other than self-awareness and rational self-direction.