Quotes About Morality

Christians are good citizens, and take human laws very seriously, for religious reasons, not just for secular reasons. That's why they are better citizens than atheists, and certainly better citizens than moral relativists and subjectivists: they have stronger motives for obedience.

There—fore what is contrary to human nature is contrary to God's will.

we have that the animal does not: reason and free will, or free choice.

4) But only man knows consciously and rationally, and only man's loves can be conscious and rational and responsible through free will.

The idea of resolving conflicts by killing people (which is what war is) is not a just thing, a just idea. In that sense there is no such thing as "just war". But to wage a given war may be a just action.

why contraception is not only wrong but sacrilegious:

Tempting is not forcing.

these relativists turn out to be not relativistic at all about one thing: their relativism. That's their one nonnegotiable absolute.

As I said, relativism says there are no absolutes. Absolutely no absolutes.

Hypocrisy, it is said, is "the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man's wrong and each man's right are different.

If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?

Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece , where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus , but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece . The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro.

He watched Clint Eastwood for a while. He had never much enjoyed cop films or cop programs on television, but watching right here and now, he could identify with Dirty Harry tracking down the villains and dealing with them his own way. He had meant what he said to Blackstone. A few minutes alone with Pamela Jeffreys's attackers and they would know what police brutality was all about.

It's an odd thing is a professional gone bad. They talk about bent coppers, but what about bent lawyers, bent accountants, bent doctors? If push came to shove, would you expect one crooked businessman to stick up for another?

embarrassing entanglements. "Bribery interferes with trade, investment, and development," Hillary Clinton said at the OECD's fiftieth-anniversary forum in 2011. "It undermines good governance and encourages greater corruption. And of course, it is morally wrong—and far too common." On that we can all agree.

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.

Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.

Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations about honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.)

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

The unchallenged assumption is that humans may use animals for their own purposes, and they may raise and kill them to satisfy their preference for a diet containing animal flesh.

It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

Why [..] should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?