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Quotes About Morality

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
~ William Hazlitt
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
~ William Hazlitt
LOLA Oh, no. She's probably going out with Turk tonight. DOC    She's too nice a girl to be going out with a guy like Turk. LOLA I don't know why, Daddy. Turk's nice.
~ William Inge
Whatsoever is not said in all sincerity, is wrongly said. And not to be able to rid oneself of this vice is only to sink deeper toward perdition. "Those who do evil in the open light of day—men will punish them. Those who do evil in secret—God will punish them. Who fears both man and God, he is fit to walk alone.
~ William J. Bennett
Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. . . . The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree.
~ William J. Bennett
Parents often say, "Don't let me catch you doing that again!" and that is all right, but a good, honest life is more than that. Moral development is not a game of "Catch me if you can." It is better to focus clearly on what really matters: the kind of person one is.
~ William J. Bennett
Wherein you reprove another be unblamable yourself, for example is more prevalent than precept.
~ William J. Bennett
James Madison takes up the question of whether a relatively small number of legislators can be trusted to safeguard the public liberty. Such a system can work, Madison argues, as long as the political and moral responsibilities of the people remain intact. Democracy presupposes the virtue of its individual citizens.
~ William J. Bennett
Saith he, If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth is as much to say as that he is brave toward God and a coward toward men. For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so highly expressed as in that it shall be the last peal to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men; it being foretold that when Christ cometh, he shall not find faith upon the earth.
~ William J. Bennett
Perhaps the most that can be said is that HCM had become a prisoner of his own creation, a fly in amber, unable in his state of declining influence to escape the inexorable logic of a system that sacrificed the fate of individuals to the higher morality of the master plan.
~ William J. Duiker
All of which goes to prove that there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.
~ William J. Mann
had taken it upon herself to sit through as many of the devil's entertainments as she could tolerate, cataloging every sin.
~ William J. Mann
he abhorred these self-righteous, self-appointed arbiters of morality. He called them "the Anvil Chorus," pointing out that every new development in history had drawn the fear and suspicion of people like them.
~ William J. Mann
The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
~ William James
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
~ William James
our moral and practical attitude....impulses, inhibitions.... how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar.... It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287]
~ William James
At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?
~ William James
We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
~ William James
In forming a judgment of ourselves now, Edwards writes, we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day…. There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence…. The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.
~ William James
In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him.
~ William L. Shirer
He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding. I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you.
~ William L. Shirer
Thus Spake Zarathustra
~ William L. Shirer
And Treitschke outdoes Hegel in proclaiming war as the highest expression of man. To him "martial glory is the basis of all the political virtues; in the rich treasure of Germany's glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious as the masterpieces of our poets and thinkers." He holds that "to play blindly with peace… has become the shame of the thought and morality of our age.
~ William L. Shirer
But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler "was the first to get up and turn back," leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He
~ William L. Shirer