Quotes About Morality

Character assassination is one of the greatest pastimes of the village righteous and

I left them to their lives and walked out into the sun. You want to do the right thing, but sometimes there is no right thing to be done.

G]ood people are rarely suspicious: they cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one, and let matters rest there.

psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised.

What makes psychopaths different from all others is the remarkable ease with which they lie, the pervasiveness of their deception, and the callousness with which they carry it out.

G]ood people are rarely suspicious: they cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one, and let matters rest there. Then

Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease .. - In Defense of Henry Kissinger, The Atlantic 2013 May http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/p...

The problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again! is that it ignores limits and the availability of resources. World War II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left of European Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and Asian balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States—something that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned.

Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.

Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.

The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.

Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous. "All nations are tempted—and few have been willing to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law," he goes on, "is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another.

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin's admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title "Historical Inevitability," in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics.

Like all wise men, he thought tragically: for we create moral standards in order to measure our own inadequacies.

If there's evil in recklessness, there's also evil in banality.

Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.

Murder is a sin. It's a sin in Judaism, it's a sin in Christianity, it's a sin in Islam and every other… - I'll decide what's a sin.

You've got to love what's lovable, and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Self-respect, courage, and integrity look good ona man.

Kindness is the sunshine in which virtue grows.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil. Power is a game—this cannot be repeated too often—and in games you do not judge your opponents by their intentions but by the effect of their actions.