Quotes About Morality

What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.

The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another.

A bullet's velocity in low temperatures greatly depends on its target's virtues

Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can't run away.

Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.

CAMPBELL: You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.

Moyers: Then what does love have to do with morality? Campbell: Violates it....Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage....Love was a divine visitation, and that's why it was superior to marriage.

Our time has changed, and it's changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that's what it's not doing, and that's why it's ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion.

where do these kids get their myths today? CAMPBELL: They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they're doing the best they can. But they're dangerous because their own laws are not those of the city. They have not been initiated into our society.

In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, "Thou shalt not kill." Then the next chapter says, "Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it." That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other.

whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns—one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity—where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one.

Only God can judge me now

It is true the precious schoolboy is very nearly ridiculous, but a sacred respect for his proud free self is already growing up within him, a respect for everything that has been corroded in us by spiritual poverty and anxious paternal morality. We must go to the devil.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

Vengeance is not justice." The man's voice was grim. "It is in my book." ~ The Perfect Kill

No man was worth dying over. But she was beginning to think some just might be worth killing over.

No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.

Rolf Harris is a hard man to hate, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try

Right you guessed the rising morrow And scorned to tread the mire you must: Dust's your wages, son of sorrow, But men may come to worse than dust. Souls undone, undoing others,- Long time since the tale began. You would not live to wrong your brothers: Oh lad, you died as fits a man.

The old gods have the beauty and goodness of the sun, the sea, the wind, the mountains, great wild animals; splendid, powerful, and dangerous realities that do not come within the sphere of human morality, and are in no way concerned about the human race.

Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.

Hunger and necessity are poor teachers of morality. A society that cannot provide the basics of life does not get its laws obeyed.

It must be pleasant to be occasionally guilty of a small abomination.