Quotes About Morality

To say of men that they are bad is to say they are worse than we think we are, or worse than the ideal man whose image we have built up on the basis of a certain few.

We are not na?ve enough to ask for pure men; we ask merely for men whose impurity does not conflict with the obligations of their job.

Did poverty in itself lead to moral failings, such as crime? Was "goodness" something that could be objectified and measured? Did society benefit directly from individual virtue, and therefore have incentive to promote it? Did our concepts of goodness have their foundations in religious and spiritual practice? What about the notion that money was the root of all evil, and those monks and nuns who felt it necessary to deny themselves material wealth?

But basing a whole philosophy of life on what you would do in extremis does not seem to me to be right.

An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.

What sort of men?" "They don't believe in God, but they have just as much faith in humanity as we do.

so slow is moral progress. True, we have the bicycle, the motor-car, the dirigible airship and other marvellous means of breaking our bones; but our morality is not one rung the higher for it all. One would even say that, the farther we proceed in our conquest of matter, the more our morality recedes. The most advanced of our inventions consists in bringing men down with grapeshot and explosives with the swiftness of the reaper mowing the corn.

It seems impossible that good people – so many good people – can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken.

Unfortunately, the very characteristic that led him to embody the goodness that surrounded him also led him to embrace evil when he met it.

Despite everything he's been through, or maybe also because of it, her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation.

Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I shall always maintain that whoso says in his heart, "There is no God," while he takes the name of God upon his lips, is either a liar or a madman.

Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man

It was important therefore to avoid themes that were difficult or too intellectual, not to shock the spectator's morals by overly bold ideas, and to respect a complex code of conventions that every author, producer and director had to be familiar with, under threat of seeing himself lambasted by the countless leagues in defence of morality – or still worse, confronted by a public boycott.

even a tiny bit of deceit is dishonorable when it's used for selfish or cowardly reasons. - Mr. Penderwick

When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?' 'You wouldn't want to. That's what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.

When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?' 'You wouldn't want to. That's what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.

What you need to learn, children, is the difference between right and wrong in every area of life. And once you learn the difference, you must always choose the right.

That's the difference between you and them, between any person of integrity and any criminal. You wanted to do harm, but you didn't. The restraints held. That's what civilization is... That's what morality is. Maybe we can't always keep our emotions in check, but so long as we control our actions, we'll stay on the right side of the line.

Extreme corruption steals our dignity from us as human beings and degrades us to the level of animals,

Every night I go over what I did in the day, in ethical or moral terms. Have I treated people properly? Did I tell the truth?

I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.