Quotes About Morality

I never understood why you would ever feel the need to shoot the fish in the barrel. I mean, they're in a barrel, you've already caught them. The hard work's done, they can't escape. So if you want them dead, just drain the water out. Why bring guns into it?

Which is scarier-- lust or temptation?

There may be a wrong way to do the right thing, but never a right way to do a wrong thing.

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

money kill justice

From this quantum shift in the hardwiring of perception, of course, the much celebrated spiritual and moral attainments would understandably flow, since a mind that does not need to separate and exclude in order to perceive reality will encounter far less resistance in the current of life and inflict far less violence upon others.

Well, one shouldn't smoke when he's drunk and one mustn't fall in love with a girl who isn't the right religion.

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

Así que es a eso que se encamina la nueva generación de lectores: hacia esa perdición que es el egotismo y las pretensiones de superiodad moralizadora y politizada?

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

The big thieves hang the little ones.

And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil, Only beauty will call to them and save them So that they will know how to say: this is true and that is false.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.

El verdadero opio del pueblo es la creencia en la nada después de la muerte; el gran consuelo que trae pensar que no vamos a ser juzgados por nuestras traiciones, avaricia, cobardía y crímenes

If there is no God, Not everything is permitted to man. He is still his brother's keeper And he is not permitted to sadden his brother, By saying there is no God.

Unable to restrain himself, driven by sheer love for the animal, he fired. It was a young one, so slender that what he had taken for a squirrel was not a squirrel but the shimmer of color deposited in its wake. Its body bending and unbending on the moss, it clutched its chest with its tiny paws, at the bloody patch on its little white vest. It didn't know what death was; it was trying to remove it, as if it were a spike on which it had been impaled and around which it could only pivot.

The only human beings in the neighborhood who were not looking forward to a happy day were members of the local constabulary, for it seemed pretty certain that a good many otherwise law-abiding people would come in motor cars, burning gas that had been allotted them for domestic purposes only, and the English bobby does not fancy himself in the role of Gestapo official.

in those days nobody talked about being happy, like they do now – nobody minded whether children were happy, the really important thing was that they should be good. But I really think that people were just as happy as they are now, only they never thought about whether they were or not.

I always feel uncomfortable when I do things forbidden by Tim. (A relic of Victorianism, I suppose.)

A man is not a man nowadays," he cried with passionate bitterness. "Or at least he may not behave like one. He must bow his head to injustice, he must keep the law—even when he knows it to be false and unjust. Men fight with their tongues now, with lies and deceit. In the old days life was free and simple.

There are no simple answers in life. There is a good and bad in everyone and everything. No decision is made without consequence. No road is taken that doesn't lead to another. What's important is that those roads always be kept open, for there's no telling what wonder they might lead to.

You want to kill me, don't you? And here I thought you and your friends were so righteous. You are just as capable of evil as anyone. Perhaps more so. Yet you believe your brand of evil is justified, so long as it serves your own misguided purposes." --Saint Dane

There's good. There's evil. And there's a sea of confusion in between. I can only hope that at some point I'll be able to sort it out.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?