Quotes About Morality

Man can either be less than man or more than man, and both are monsters, the last more dread.

It is enough to say that prophets of expediency who are careless of the means they use and who work outside the human and moral values, have never been able to build anything humanly worth while.

Patriotism must be founded on great principals and supported by great virtue.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Don't believe that winning is really everything. It's more important to stand for something. If you don't stand for something, what do you win

And so it must be in every man while his moral habits are not purified; and, though there may be many shades, some of a more and some a less pronounced and settled character, yet there are, after all, only two main classes. A man must either deny or indulge himself. There is no middle or indifferent state—for the not denying is indulgence; it is throwing the reins on the neck of his lusts, though he may lack boldness to set the spur;

Is not Christianity something altogether simpler than this? Have not all dogmas been successfully dissolved by literary tact? Is not religion just "morality touched with emotion," just precepts of good living, only "heightened and lit up by feeling"? Well, that Stoicism answered more or less to this description we have already seen; it was a system of morals that at times put on an emotional dress and masqueraded as a religion, and by stripping off this dress we lose no characteristic feature.

I would rather be right than be President.

I would rather be right than President.

Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.

Sir, I would rather be right than to be President.

I'd rather be right than be President

Sir, I had rather be right than to be President.

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!

What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

Law never made men a whit more just.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.