Quotes About Morality

At the heart of my argument is the view that religious faith, far from being inevitably on the side of the status quo, should on principle hold this world to higher standards.

Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

the end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end.

when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories.

There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.

Homicide at its best stinks to high heaven because everyone walking this earth has a closet he'd prefer leaving closed and homicide rarely knocks before entering.

What drives my life is not the desire to get along with other people or make friends so much as a moral obligation to give back as much as—no, more than—I take. That's karma. It's really not so far from the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Some

Morally, however, we had had absolutely no choice but to abort our summit try to help Thor and Chantal get down the mountain. That's why I find it so hard to stomach all the accounts in recent years—especially on Everest—of climbers ignoring others in trouble for fear a rescue effort would sabotage their own summit bids.

And there is a rule in every major religion, called the Golden Rule. Essentially: treat other people the way you'd like to be treated yourself. If we all did this, the whole world would work instantaneously. Praying, meditation—fine. But just follow the Golden Rule and the whole world works. Making the world work could be that simple.

it has remained for man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.

All he knew was that he could not eat the flesh of this black man, and thus hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide law of whose very existence he was ignorant.

As you know I am not of Barsoom; your ways are not my ways, and I can only act in the future as I have in the past, in accordance with the dictates of my conscience and guided by the standards of mine own people.

What are you Tarzan? he asked aloud. An ape or a man? If you are an ape, you will do as the apes do - leave one of your kind in the jungle to die if it suited your whim to go elsewhere. If you are a man, you will return to protect your kind. You will not run away from one of your own people, because one has run away from you.

Appropriately, his bird was the vulture. The dog was wronged by being chosen as his animal.

Don't expect the material rewards of unrighteousness while engaged in the pursuit of truth.

In the Odyssey when a priest and a poet fall on their knees before Odysseus, praying him to spare their lives, the hero kills the priest without a thought, but saves the poet. Homer says that he felt awe to slay a man who had been taught his divine art by the gods. Not the priest, but the poet, had influence with heaven—and no one was ever afraid of a poet.

The dispensations of God are always just,' he said. 'We get the sons we deserve.

Our world is going through a crisis of dehumanization, breakup of family life, a general loss of moral values.

The very good people did not convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands - and you hated the things it asked of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before - and it's better than anything I've known.

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

when such things happened it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a nice girl, and then trust her to look after him.

Well--there it was, and the fault was doubtless neither hers nor his, but that of the world they had grown up in, of their own moral contempt for it and physical dependence on it, of his half-talents and her half-principles, of the something in them both that was not stout enough to resist nor yet pliant enough to yield.