Quotes About Morality

I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers.

As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?

Outside my window, the British public traded crack, slept with itself for money, and fought drunken battles it couldn't remember in the morning.

Now, my mom always said two wrongs don't make a right. But she never said anything about four wrongs, and that always left me confused.

We do the right things because it's the right thing to do. We respond to others' needs because they have those needs. Our survival depends on cooperation. [p61, paraphrased]

There's plenty of symmetry in revenge, but no virtue.

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the House of the Lord than mingle with the top brass in the tents of the wicked.

You can always somebody who is worse than you are to make you feel virtuous. It's a cheap shot: those awful terrorists, perverts, communists--they are the ones who need to repent! Yes, indeed they do, and for them repentance will be a full-time job, exactly as it is for all the rest of us.

Once men inure themselves against the obvious injustices of slavery and defend its use for the economic advantages they believe it brings, humanity deserts them

Being rich is bad and inhumane. So condemn the rich.

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

Immanuel Kant" "Noch wal

It is no less ancient than a pestilent error wherewith many men (but they chiefly who abound in power and riches) persuade themselves, or (as I think more truly) go about to persuade, that right and wrong are distinguished not according to their own nature but by a certain vain opinion and custom of men.

I don't believe in principles. They don't exist! There are laws and facts...

From time immemorial, healthy people have held sick people hostage…I believe hostage-holding of the sick is immoral, fundamentally unethical, and needs to be stopped.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

If one does not have these five things there is no good in him: intellect, religion, etiquette, shame and good manners.

Honor and dignity of man is only in virtue and piety.

Good will and ill will are just two sides of the same card...

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man's success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. "Don't worry," he yawned. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it." That

If your heart isn't in the right place, you're no different from the beasts in the forest.

God too, has sinned, that's what I used to think. He looked down on this blazing hell, and he remained silent. (2007: 142)