Quotes About Morality

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Mundus vult decipi. The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not call it dishonesty.

You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-- it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven

there is no Jezebel remedy. There's no conscience chemo. No pill for cheating. No therapeutic number of Hail Marys or blow jobs or home-cooked meals or good-wife deeds.

In an unjust society a man may violate laws for valid social or economic reasons. In a just society there are no valid reasons except mental illness.

Sin is commitable in thought, word or deed; so is virtue.

We starve the rats, creosote the ticks, swat the flies, step on the cockroaches and poison the scales. Yet when these pests appear in human form we go paralytic.

Our moral theorists seem never content with the normal. Why must it always be a contest between fornication, obesity and laziness, and celibacy, fasting and hard labor?

The inventor of soda crackers has a place in hell.

On J-Day our profession will have a lot to answer for! We might at least have withheld our hands instead of making them work against God.

If someone throws herself off a tall building, it may make sense to employ Newtonian physics in order to explain her immediate prospects. But it is also quite obvious that this explanation fails to address other important questions which we may wish to ask about that person's life and fate.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

A man cannot do good before he is made good.

Men are not made religious by performing certain actions which are externally good, but they must first have righteous principles, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

We will have to depend in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people

A unjust law, is no law at all.

many pass for saints on earth whose souls are in hell.

Great thieves go Scott-free, as the Pope and his crew.

Be careful not to measure your holiness by other people's sins.

I see a word that hates evil more than it loves good.

Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works; evil works do not make a wicked man, but a wicked man does evil works.

People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.