Quotes About Morality

All anger feels like righteous anger; sorrow does not care whether it is righteous or not.

A woman finds it much easier to do ill than well. [Lat., Mulieri nimio male facere melius est onus, quam bene.]

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it?

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not 'significant' to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.

Communists and capitalists alike, liberal and conservative capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, I am doing this because I can't do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable. The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.

And so our reclamation project has been, for me, less a matter of idealism or morality than a kind of self-preservation. A destructive history, once it is understood as such, is a nearly insupportable burden. Understanding it is a disease of understanding, depleting the sense of efficacy and paralyzing effort, unless it finds healing work." Excerpt From The World-Ending Fire Wendell Berry This material may be protected by copyright.

the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

What is called the morality of a society is no more than a consequence of the morality of individuals. There is, by the same token, no such thing as a purely private morality, for the morals of private citizens are public in effect, and are increasingly so.

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of the Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably.

And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils.

They would not have been easy in their minds if there was something they could have got away with if they had not got away with it.

I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies.

Franklin's idea for a multidenominational church where all who accepted "the existence of a supreme intelligence" could come together in celebration of common ideas of morality rather than fixed religious doctrines

The philanthropist who could not pass a beggar without parting with his money, the nature lover who felt he did not have the right to stamp on a spider let alone mistreat a horse, the humanitarian who opposed slavery because it was the "absolute dependence of one man upon another," was utterly convinced he had every right to keep a young woman subject to his total command and groom her to meet his desires

Yet at a time when people were locked in debate over the significance of nature over nurture, Day's project did not seem quite so outlandish or immoral. As a product of his time, his gender and his rank, he possessed the power and money to pursue his quest, and he therefore believed he had every right to subvert another person to meet his ideals. He was, perhaps, more deluded than wicked

MR. MOUSTAFA There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once know as humanity... He was one of them. What more is there to say?

men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.

No fim, o desejo era como uma doença, uma loucura, ou ambas. Deixei de pensar nos outros, desfrutava o prazer onde quer que o encontrasse e seguia adiante. Esqueci que cada pequena ação cotidiana pode fazer ou desfazer um caráter e que tudo aquilo que fazemos no segredo da alcova, teremos que confessá-lo um dia, gritando do alto dos telhados.

The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk.

Tell him next, that crimes cause their own detection. There's another bit of copy-book morality for you, Fosco. Crimes cause their own detection. What infernal humbug!