Quotes About Morality

I try to find what makes even the worst, most despicable character sympathetic at his or her core.

I always loved Flannery O'Conner, and how she's not trying to create sympathetic characters.

Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.

My blood runs cold when I hear the 'great news' that we have found a marker for the Down's syndrome gene, which means we can identify it more easily. Why is that good news? It's only good news if you're going to terminate.

If physical power be the fountain of law, then law and force are synonymous terms. Or, perhaps, rather, law would be the result of a combination of will and force; of will, united with a physical power sufficient to compel obedience to it, but not necessarily having any moral character whatever.

Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principles.

We're still expecting capitalism to solve problems: 'Maybe if we sell enough oil, we can give some profits to an environmental agency!' Capitalism isn't a moral system.

I'm a God-fearing man, go to church every Sunday, and have since I was a boy. But if I ever found out that God cared one way or another about a borderline illegal fist-fight on Saturday night, I would be so greatly disappointed that it would make rethink my entire belief system.

All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.

The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally," Eliot once wrote. "The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.

Keep all your promises, don't take what doesn't belong to you, and always look after those less fortunate than yourself, and you'll do well in the world.

Who's the real you? The person who did something awful, or the one who's horrified by the awful thing you did? Is one part of you allowed to forgive the other?

I wanted to be good, but I wasn't sure if I WAS good or if I just wanted Dad and Aunt Ess and everyone to SEE me being good.

I sneaked a little bunch of grapes, which I love but can't ever have, because Mom doesn't like the way the grape pickers are treated in California and she refuses to buy them. *

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

Evil isn't beautiful on its own. You know?' 'Well, good people are sometimes ugly-' Blanche said at last. 'I don't know about that. Not really,' Bear shook his head. 'If the good's there, and you look for it, you'll see it in some way.' 'I think Bear is right,' Rose said decidedly. 'Fairy tales teach you that. No one who's really good ever stays ugly. It's always a disguise.

Evil things often look beautiful. But that's because they've stolen the beauty from the good.... Evil isn't beautiful on its own.

then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.

Reason is a necessary instrument, to be used for good or evil, but it has no moral qualities.

The moral achievement of statesmen must be judged in terms which take account of the limitations of human society which the statesman must, and the prophet need not, consider.

There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.