Quotes About Morality

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

According to the Stoics, all vice was resolvable into folly: according to the Christian principle, it is all the effect of weakness.

We need to deal with the economy and the moral weakness of the country.

Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity.

One of my weaknesses is that I actually have a conscience.

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.

Wealth is a thing, earned with honesty and justice. Its opposite is the Mammon of unrighteousness.

The glory that goes with wealth is fleeting and fragile; virtue is a possession glorious and eternal.

If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.

Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all: only our characters are steadfast, not our gold.

Innocent pleasures are got by virtue and well-earned wealth.

When the sacredness of one's word is matched in the attributes of his character throughout, all that constitutes a man, then we find that there is something in a man's life greater than his occupation or his achievements; grander than acquisition or wealth; higher than genius; more enduring than fame.

It's morally wrong, and economically self-defeating, that so much wealth flows upwards towards the richest of Americans, while millions work full time but still can't provide for their families.

Business executives need to start by spelling out and communicating their values. Then they need to lead by example. This means getting rid of the bad apples and declining opportunities that bring instant wealth at the cost of selling one's soul.

Wealth and compassion are opposites.

Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.

With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue.

Do not consider that to be wealth which is hoarded away, for how is it better than sand gathered from the nearest heap? Nor that which comes in from men who groan at their taxes: for the gold that is wrung from tears is of base alloy and black.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

Status based on wealth is an old-fashioned idea; I find it repugnant, actually.

The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.

Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.

If somebody has an extreme amount of wealth and is not using it for some good purpose, only for their own enjoyment or satisfaction, then clearly there's a moral failing in the world in which we live.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.