Quotes About Morality

Sin is more basic than what we do. Sin is who we are. In this regard we could say that sin is fundamentally a matter of ontology (being), not simply morality. To be a human is to be a sinner. It is to be broken, damaged goods that carry within our deepest self a fundamental, fatal flaw—a flaw that masks our original creation goodness and infects our very being.

I know what I'm talking about," she said sharply. "I'm Vice-President and a founding member of the Alliance for Ethical Lechery. Keeping an incubus is nothing less than sexual slavery.

Fearing a court martial for disobedience, some of the soldiers at My Lai participated in the massacre. Normative influence leads to compliance, especially for people who have recently seen others ridiculed or who are seeking to climb a status ladder (Hollander, 1958; Janes & Olson, 2000).

Mahatma Gandhi claimed that betting was a more pernicious evil than drinking.

What will you do now?' I think I will become a monk and devote my entire life to prayer and good works.' No,' said Rek. 'I mean, what will you do today?' Ah! Today I'll get drunk and go whoring,' said Bowman.

Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the persuit of evil.

Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the pursuit of evil. Never back away from an enemy. Either fight or surrender. It is not enough to say I will not be evil. Evil must be fought wherever it is found."The Iron Code

This is not a quote by me, but one of my favorites: "If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.

Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.

Sex and desire is the one realm of life where justice is not only impossible, it's inconceivable.

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken

While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all.

Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one's adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed

There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation—and a handful is all it takes.

impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in liberto officium ("to be the object of anal penetration is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedman").

good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

when dealing with the Absolute, there can be no such thing as debt.

What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you give him a thousand dollars of "protection money," and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him with a thousand-dollar "loan"? In

As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again.

money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The

Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?

One historian who went through fifty years of police reports about knife-fights in nineteenth-century Ionia discovered that virtually every one of them began when one party publicly suggested that the other's wife or sister was a whore.

The result has been strangely paradoxical: anthropological reflections on their own culpability has mainly had the effect of providing non-anthropologists who do not want to be bothered having to learn about 90% of human experience with a handy two or three sentence dismissal (you know: all about projecting one's sense of Otherness into the colonized) by which they can feel morally superior to those who do.

The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have 'naturally', even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws?