Quotes About Morality

First premise: If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it. Second premise: Extreme poverty is bad. Third premise: There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance. Conclusion: We ought to prevent some extreme poverty.

As long as we remember that we should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we give to the lives of those humans at a similar mental level, we shall not go far wrong.

No doubt we instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations.

So it is worse to slap a baby than a horse, if both slaps are administered with equal force.

Evil is a convenient fiction.

We are bombarded with the pellmell religious convictions of footballers, pop-singers, actors playing new parts for old money, politicians and the rest, moral perverts all, masquerading as mixed up souls who get the message in time.

Learn this moral: first establish your right to the good things of this world, grab the biggest share of prosperity possible less ten per cent for charity, then mouth pious nothings into a microphone in the comfort of your town or country house.

Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525)

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the 'profoundest error in human history – namely the invention of morality'.

That little whisper—"You deserve it"—comes, I believe, from the worst part of our sinful natures, the part that always wants another cookie, a bigger house, a nicer TV. I'm pretty sure it's the same voice that told Hitler he "deserved" Poland.

secular people don't believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.

But the fact that highly secular nations and states fare so well compared to religious nations and states, and the fact that many nations have seen violent crime and other social pathologies decrease over time as secularity has simultaneously increased, does prove that morality clearly doesn't hinge upon the existence of God, or require belief in God.

secular parents are far from amoral. They may not raise their children religiously, but that does not mean that they raise them without values or ethical precepts. Some common, consistent moral principles secular parents impart to their children include valuing and obeying the Golden Rule, being environmentally conscious, developing empathy, cultivating independent thinking, and relying upon rational problem solving.

humanist principles—especially those that emphasize human worth and dignity, the imperative to respect human rights, reverence for life, and the intrinsic ability of humans to be caring and just—provide the foundations of secular moral orientations.

As Hans Bernd Gisevius, a civil servant under Hitler and a member of the German Resistance, puts it: One of the vital lessons that we must learn from the German disaster is the ease with which a people can be sucked down into the morass of inaction; let them as individuals fall prey to overcleverness, opportunism, or cowardliness and they are irrevocably lost.

The distinc­tives of the Christian faith cannot be bartered for the blandishments of a fashionable bonhomie.

There is a moral sturdiness to (hardware store owner) Charley that isn't advertised or boasted about, but is obvious to all who know him and quickly discerned by those who don't. Our country has lately been afflicted with television preachers and pundits who focus on our families while neglecting theirs. How vainglorious these critics seem, how vacuous and shallow they appear when placed alongside a man of Charley's stature.

The Manchester Guardian noted: 'People do not understand this legalistic attitude to affairs of life and death.

wrote White, expressing the firm belief that 'England will best Germany because Germany is wicked, and the English, if not salt of the earth, are "good" men

Morality was the preserve – literally – of the middle classes; those at either end of the social scale were not obsessed with the moral glue that gave a new class its sense of cohesion.

why should human beings have another chance at an afterlife? They were such miserable, conniving, self-deceiving, hypocritical wretches.

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man .

There is evil! It's actual, like cement. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. Evil is not a view ... it's an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.

It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.