Quotes About Morality

I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose," said Isabel

The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights confront each other.

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

To me there is not only right or wrong but many shades in between...The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes [illegible] in a dilemma of evaluating what is right...Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can't even begin to comprehend.

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.

Sin, guilt, neurosis --they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Since man is a moral being, his culture cannot be a-moral. Because man is a religious being, his culture, too, must be religiously oriented.

If there was a god, he wouldn't let a guy walk right up and shoot you in the face now would he? That's right, now you get the picture. Truth burns doesn't it?

The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may so say) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realized in the one case than in the other.

Reason shows me that if my happiness is desirable and good, the equal happiness of any other person must be equally desirable. ...

A sin is two sins when it is defended.

Be noble in every thought And in every deed!

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Selfishness at the expense of others' happiness is demonism.

I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.

Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself.

Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.

Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It's getting money without giving an equivalent for it.

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.