Quotes About Morality

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.

Living creatures, if nothing else, have the right to life. It is their only truly precious possession, and the stealing of life is a wicked theft

In work and in life, no matter how smart, talented, and beautiful you are, you also have to be a good person.

By these things examine thyself. By whose rules am I acting; in whose name; in whose strength; in whose glory? What faith, humility, self-denial, and love of God and to man have there been in all my actions?

Sex is a bad thing because it rumples the clothes.

Sensuality begins sometimes with kindness, but it ends always in the most reckless and intolerable cruelty.

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.

to terrify children with hell is that good for the world

The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government.

Ugly is how someone acts, not how they look.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.

Much as we do not permit convicted pedophiles to teach kindergarten or convicted hijackers to board airplanes, common sense dictates that individuals who have been imprisoned for plotting violence against abortion clinics should never again be permitted anywhere near such facilities.

I'm not really interested in the black and white, the 'goodies and baddies.' I find the complexity of the gray areas more compelling, more intriguing. As I have said before, there are angels and demons in all of us, and I am interested in the relationship between the two within the 'ordinary' person.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice

Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.

the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality

The prince] dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever evil must be done to preserve himself and the state.

A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.

A first order of conclusions will likely appear even more abstract and difficult! It is that Christians must not judge, act, or live according to principles, but according to the reality of the eschaton, lived out here and now. This is exactly the opposite of a moralism.

My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.

If at the present day it has found a warm welcome among certain circles in Europe, it is because all those who hope to derive from humanitarianism a moral code of human kindness for the acceptance of an atheistic society are already implicitly Buddhists.

?o sa potom stane, ak na druhej strane - a teraz z h?adiska ?udského dobra - mravné svedomie umelca za predpokladu, že ho má, prehlási, že nie?o v diele, ?o je umelecky dobré a nutné, pokým môže súdi?, je mravne zlé a musí sa teda zmeni?? ..potom sa umelec musí snaži?, aby o?istil svoj prame?. nie je to pohodlné a je na to treba ve?kú trpezlivos?. iné reálne riešenie neexistuje.