Quotes About Morality

Notice how atheists who believe in real right and wrong make a massive intellectual leap of faith. They believe that somehow moral facts were eternally part of the "furniture" of reality but that from impersonal and valueless slime, human persons possessing rights, dignity, worth, and duties were eventually produced.

It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.

Goodness deliberately chooses to do the right thing and firmly resists what is wrong. Merely avoiding bad things doesn't make women good.

cynicism enables you to do nothing but feel morally superior to those who are doing something good but imperfect in an imperfect

Courage without conscience," wrote Robert Green Ingersoll, "is a wild beast.

Some of us are sinning because we aren't angry enough over what makes God angry.

The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in society....—George Steiner, After Babel

The point is, however: God save us all from the moral zealot who places himself above the law and is willing to burn my house down, and yours, providing he feels he is sufficiently right and I sufficiently wrong.

glory and accomplishment are of far less importance than the creation of character and the individual good life.

Nowadays it is no longer a question of who is right, but who is at least not criminal

To put it simply, you are never right to make wrong, or wrong to make right. To be right, make right.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.

Are you sure what you're doing is wrong?

Solomon's Laws: 8. If a guy who's smart, handsome, and rich invites you and your girlfriend to a nudist club...chances are he's got a giant shmeckel .

A good lawyer is part con man, part priest -- promising riches, threatening hell. My ethical rules are simple. I won't lie to the court or let a client do it. But I've never been in this position. How far would I go for a woman who mattered? Is there anything I wouldn't do to win?

In my experience, honest people don't need to put their hand on a Bible to tell the truth, and with dishonest people, it makes no difference.

If stealing a few saltshakers was wrong I didn't want to be right.

Two wrongs don't make a right but sometimes they make me laugh. I am a vengeful god.

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.

Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived.

Wherever the killing season should next begin and people should become strangers to their neighbors and themselves, my hope is that there will still be those ordinary men who say a quiet no and open the rooms upstairs.