Quotes About Morality

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

The thing that scares me is that some part of me understands where they're coming from. They took everything from us, you know? Why shouldn't we be able to take it back if we have the power to?

Leadership, in short, is power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality.

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

Great men are almost always bad men.

We ask for nothing that is not ours by right, and herein lies the great moral power of our demand.

The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used - we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immorality.

Power positions do not yield to arguments, however rationally and morally valid, but only to superior power.

Free will is the power of choosing good and evil.

It is impossible to reign innocently.

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.

A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our hearts. That's the power of story.

Character - not wealth, power, or position - is the supreme word.

Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore, they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because the don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.

You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.

Great men are never cruel without necessity.

Power won by crime no one ever yet turned to a good purpose.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

Booker T. Washington