Quotes About Morality

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.

In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied--what used to be called an 'appetitive' person.

Where we find wrongs done to animals, it is no excuse to say that more important wrongs are done to human beings, and let us concentrate on those. A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the gravest harm to ourselves and others.

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

Spinoza tells us that we do not desire or detest things because we judge them to be good or evil; we judge them good or evil because we desire or detest them.

Vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the Nature of man alone consider'd."67 Conversely, "nothing is so likely to make a man's fortune as virtue."68

l'humble prend ses décisions selon ce qu'il estime être juste et s'y tient, sans s'inquiéter ni de son image ni du qu'en-dira-t-on.

I have not been deaf to truth" and "I have not winked at injustice.

A lawful kiss is never worth a stolen one.

Jennings is too tough and honest a writer to let anyone off her moral hook, even her hero.

Pedepsele nu sunt împ?rÈ›ite muritorilor de o guvernan?? ar??goas? sau de un dasc?l despotic; nu, pedeapsa e rezultatul logic, consecin?? inevitabil? a faptei rele.

It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity.

A man who would agree to betray his own conscience for the sake of a mitre, might well also steal and betray.

Because chance infidelities do not prevent one thinking, indeed rather the contrary, of the person to whom one is being unfaithful; indeed it is the most frequent manner of being faithful that men have.

It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.

We subdue that in others which we have learned to subdue in ourselves. Around the upright man there is drawn a wide circle of peace, within which the arrows of evil soon cease to fall; nor have his fellows the power to inflict moral suffering upon him.

Nations have the government which they deserve, or rather, the government which they have is truly no more than the magnified and public projection of the private morality and mentality of the nation.

Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?" there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, "What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?" And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?

Should we not invariably act in this life as though the God whom our heart desires with its highest desire were watching our every action?

To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice.

The contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives these acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents. The right of the opposition is exactly equal to the right of those in power.

No morality can be established a priori. Insofar as there are only abstract ends, there is no real morality. A moral imperative only emerges in contact with a situation.

History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion." Gerald R. Ford, thirty-eighth President of the United States of America. Served 1974–1977. The

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is the right thing to do." Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court