Quotes About Morality

The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.

Any community's arm of force--military, police, security--needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

If we can't wake up to the fact that deep down inside we are good, then we deserve to remain asleep dreaming we are evil.

There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.

His heart and his brain were utterly foreign to all vindictiveness or personal bitterness. He declared himself hotly and strongly against wrong causes, but never against men.

Love of money is the disease which renders us most pitiful and grovelling, and love of pleasure is that which renders us most despicable.

The most important thing about virtue is to talk as if you're in favor of it.

Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.

Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime.

Do not turn yourself from an end into a means -- one does not justify the other.

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

Be generous before you are just. Do not temper mercy with justice.

It is so easy to do a dirty thing with self-satisfaction when it consists in abstaining from action.

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.

Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.

There is no sterner moralist than pleasure.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

He was a man of his times. with one virtue and a thousand crimes. (The Corsair)

Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?

History is made at night. Character is what you are in the dark.

Consider what you think justice requires, and decide accordingly. But never give your reasons; for your judgment will probably be right, but your reasons will certainly be wrong.