Quotes About Morality

You're probably just like my dad. You have this kind of pride. Honor, he called it. But these days, honor is for suckers, and that makes you angry.

Do you know the fable titled 'The Vain Wolf and the Lion'?

All that was considered evil on this side of the glass might be judged good on the other side. Truth here might be lies there, and the future might precede the past.

Or his conscience had been eaten away by the cancer of narcissism.

The only monsters were people.

Under her restlessness and licentious pose is a repressed wholesomeness that will always make her regret devaluing herself, which, even in these strange times, he believes is true of more people than not.

The world's crawling with people who don't respect anyone or anything, but we're supposed to respect them, have compassion for the killers because they've been so poorly treated by life.

the morally bipolar are too preoccupied with justifying their contradictory behaviors to learn to laugh at themselves, and I've noticed they laugh at other people more than with them.

The greatest gift we were given is our free will, and we keep misusing it.

Intellect, courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy—each of those qualities was as important to the human species as all the others

When you acted on principle tempered by compassion, there was sooner or later always someone with a saw.

The only virtue is vice, and the acquisition of power justifies all things.

But once in a while, they have to see one of their own get his package cut off just so they'll stop and wonder if maybe there is a god.

by those who want to feel good about themselves without being put to the inconvenience of doing something.

I understand why the world is shapen as it is, that we should have free will and be more than ants, that we must know evil if we're also to know good.

we're not living in an age of truth and grace.

Behind every great fortune, there is a crime

I think the past might be our future, that we're busy laying the groundwork for new Dachaus, new Auschwitzes, all in the name of compassion, progress, justice, prosperity.

high priests of a theocracy, deceive them and use them with no more compunction than they would feel after deceiving a hen to take her eggs or after using a hammer to drive a nail. To those who lack a conscience, there is no such thing as remorse.

Wealth had not corrupted him. What he'd chosen to do with his wealth corrupted him. First he insulated himself from ordinary human experience, and then deemed himself superior to the masses, excused himself from all constraints not only of morality but also of tradition, and subsequently felt justified in casting off his conscience as a worthless artifact of primitive and superstitious minds. He had made of himself a malignancy in the human community.

But in war, you do the right thing, whatever it takes, and if you come out alive, you know how easy you could have screwed up, so bragging on it is dead-solid wrong. Only assholes do that.

freedom can't exist without the choice between right and wrong.

It wasn't only his business practices that distressed Olivia. Everyone knew that Warren had cheated on his wife—correction, wives. He'd flaunted his affairs until both women had filed for divorce and left town.

Human life must be cheap to the one who can place the dollar above it -John Ruston