Quotes About Morality

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797) Irish orator, philosopher, & politician

Perché il male trionfi è sufficiente che i buoni rinuncino all'azione.

None of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates, Fen added dryly, suggest that our judgements are scarcely infallible...And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn't a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.

Man with the Muckrake

To be neutral13 between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them.

Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring.

Gide was the tutelary god of my adolescence, and I immersed myself in his work. He wasn't a very good role model, since he made it clear that he was a pedophile, not a homosexual, and genuinely immoral.

Charles used to say, "If God had meant boys to be fucked, he would have put a hole in their ass.

You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.

He'd lived so much of his life for sexual love, which was a filthy thing, really, all that saliva and semen and anal smears, filthy! Much better to live alone and watch TV in bed or talk to Pierre-Georges as he was in his bed and watching the same movie. Both of them spotlessly clean.

So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?" "No more than every married woman.

He was a good boy and 'projected' goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.

with which we have attempted to clothe it; I am trying — as in the book that follows — to remove the whole subject from the plane of morality and to give an objective account of the expansion of the United States.

That's the trouble with all you liberals: you think that people ought to be kept alive just because they happen to exist.

Life is complicated. You don't only have two simple choices: drunk or teetotaler; saint or sinner. It's more complicated than that.

the fundamental maxim of Artistotle, that true virtue is placed at an equal distance between the opposite vices.

The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference of age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.

Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.

Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—

Science fiction is full of stories about harvesting humans and clones for their parts.

Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger: cool guys, smart, lotta meat between the ears on those fellas, and certainly trying to define who we are in the world or the universe is a noble undertaking. But isn't it somewhat as legitimate to try to define the reason why people do the horrible things they do? It's a fascinating query for me. It's a kick. Hence, my plight. I write horror.

It ain't right, Celeste said. It just ain't right to go and do what they bought you for. Why make it easy?

Doesn't private vice make a man unworthy of public office?" And now kindly Mrs. Albion looked at Mercy with genuine astonishment. "Well," she laughed, "if it did, there'd be no one to govern the land.