Quotes About Morality

Much everyday anger results when we confuse our own personal wants with general moral codes.

Show me a transcript of the words you've spoken, typed, or texted in the course of a day, an account of your doings, and a record of your transactions, and I'll show you your religion.

The tension between what is and what ought to be drives the growls against hypocrisy and the satirization of the self-satisfied and uptight.

Some gods deserve atheists.

Since causing massive unnecessary harm is wrong if anything is wrong, the judgement that factory farming is an indefensible institution seems inescapable.

After a bit, Mr. Leon said, 'This idea that you don't necessarily act in your own best interests struck me very hard when I first read Dostoevsky. Each man may choose to do things against his own interests because it preserves his personality.

Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?

There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues.

Logic wasn't the governing factor here. It rarely is in human affairs.

I don't make decisions based on money.

What do I consider myself now? A man attempting to be good. In this endeavor I have no use for church and steeple. If another man does, I only wish he finds what he needs.

Bentham maintained that what mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided. He enjoined us always to act so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Deontology states that there are certain things, like torture, that you just shouldn't do.

Most people seem to believe that not only is it permissible to turn the train down the spur, it is actually required—morally obligatory.

Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths.

You'll argue he was just Putting into practice The philosophy of eye for eye. Say what you will. I don't mind: But now we know Why Justice is blind.

What was once an open space between law and freedom, one governed by character and truth, is now deserted, so law must now do what character has abandoned.

What has happened, of course, is that over a period of time our society has slowly exited the moral world and it now lives, instead, in a psychological world. The difference is that in one there is right and wrong and in the other there is not. In this other world, we are comfortable or not, psychologically healthy or not, dysfunctional or not, but we are never sinners.

God's holiness, then, is not only the opposite of evil; it is the measure by which we know evil to be evil.

You have to give me something, Seafort. Politics is the art of the possible." Father gazed at the Station. "Sir, I can give you nothing. Morality is ... the art of the absolute.

In my mind, choice is the basis of Christianity, but the choice is not about sexuality, it is about how we treat other people. That is the choice about which we should be most concerned.

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?