Quotes About Morality

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

He was just innocent. With the best intentions, he smashed people's lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That

If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he's making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists.

For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

How would you explain the fact that atheists just know that harming an innocent human being is wrong, and can live good lives, without believing that God is the ultimate source of values and duties? To repeat: Belief in God is not necessary for objective morality; God is.

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: "If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.

Christians find in God a source of moral strength that helps us to lead better lives than those we would have led without Him, still it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that unbelievers don't often lead good moral lives—in fact, sometimes lives that put ours to shame.

The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist.

Dostoyevsky said, "All things are permitted." But man cannot live this way. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

Todo el bien proviene en ultima instancia de Dios, mientras que el mal se deriva del mal uso de la libertad por parte de las criaturas

But isn't it better to know the truth, no matter how vile?" He lifted up his head and cackled. "Whoever told you such nonsense? One kind lie is worth a thousand truths.

There is no possible line of conduct which has at some time and place been condemned, and which has not at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.

Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.

That which is not just is not law.

As Meier observes, 'Perhaps one reason that we have so little from the historical Jesus on sexual topics is that, apart from the two special cases of divorce and celibacy, where he diverged from mainstream Judaism, his views were those of mainstream Judaism.'14

When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.

William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?

Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.