Quotes About Morality

If the execution of a million or more sentient beings, the destruction of a dozen planetary communities, isn't enough—if the members of the Council need a living victim paraded in front of them to move them to act—then shame on them. And shame on us.

Do not expect to be applauded when you do the right thing, and do not expect to be forgiven when you err. But even your enemies will respect commitment - and a conscience at peace is worth more than a thousand tainted victories

Being what we humans are, what else could we do but wrong?

Parents must be sensitive to their role in the child's moral development. One day he is going to choose without you. Will he make the right choice? No amount of training is going to override the certainty of sin developing in the child's life, but the training parents give can lessen the child's addiction to the flesh and make it easier for repentance to follow his sinful indulgence.

Everything a child experiences, either by way of indulgence or the self-restraint you impose, is preparing him for the day when he will mature into a responsible, moral soul. Somewhere on that road of development, each child will graduate to commence his full accountability. That child then stands alone before God, "without excuse." It becomes his day of accountability.

FROM BIRTH, PARENTS MUST ASSUME CONTROL AND ACCOUNTABILITY FOR THE MORAL DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR CHILDREN. During the early years, we certainly do not want to destroy the child's natural drives, but we must constrain him to exercise temperance and self-control.

Parents cannot impart righteousness to their children, but they can help them develop a firm commitment to righteousness. Parents cannot write the law on the hearts of their children, but they can weave the law and the gospel into their developing consciences.

Human beings exercise responsibilities within a social setting and a framework of obligations which transcend the principle of intelligence.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

It was the right thing to do, but it could not be sustained. Not here. The

Why did you come to the frontier? [...] To track down a common thief? To revel in a moment's revenge? I thought there was more to you than that." Still Glass said nothing. Finally Kiowa said, "If you want to die in the guardhouse, that's for you to decide.

Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose.

Whether a man bows down to God or Mammon or to Cthulhu in his dark house at R'lyeh is no affair of mine . . . until he sheds one drop of blood not his own in his deity's name. Then God have mercy upon him, for I shall not.

As it sometimes happened, the good suffered for the faults of the bad.

I do my own habitual scan. I've already completed mental check-offs of the drunks, the painfully pierced, and there have been two iced coffees and a couple sharing a starfruit. Miriam is back in her spot. I go over and ask her, "If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?

It was the most important moment in human history, the telling of the first lie. That's what separates us from the other animals. It has nothing to do with humans thinking on a higher plane or having easily available credit. We lie to each other. We deliberately mislead.

We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know what crimes have been committed. - The Man in the Iron Mask (155)

As a forensic psychologist, I have met killers and psychopaths and sociopaths, but I refuse to define people as being good or evil. Wrongdoing is an absence of something good rather than something fated, or written in our DNA, or forced upon us by shitty parents, or careless teachers, or cruel friendships. Evil is not a state, it is a 'property', and when a person is in possession of enough 'property', it sometimes begins to define them.

Anyone who says honesty is the best policy is living in la-la land. Either that or they have never been married or had children. Parents lie to their kids all the time--about sex, drugs, death, and a hundred other things. We lie to those we love to protect their feelings. We lie because that's what love means, whereas unfettered honesty is cruel and the height of self-indulgence.

Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understand what he's saying but cannot accept a world that is so brutally black and white. Murder, rape and torture are the apparatus of terrorists, not of civilized societies. If we become like them, what hope do we have?

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.' And another time, 'The grass isn't greener on the other side. It's greener where you water it.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

Fairness is a hair colour not something to be balanced on a set of scales.

People think they want the truth, but the opposite is true. Honesty is mean and rough and ugly, while lying can be kinder, softer and more humane. It's not honesty that we want, but consideration and respect.