Quotes About Morality

When you tell a lie, you steal a man's right to the truth.

Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion

Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion.

Consciousness of the bad is an essential prerequisite to the promotion of the good.

If you look at things as they are, there does not seem to be a code either of man or of God on which one can pattern one's conduct. Wrong triumphs over right as much as right over wrong. Sometimes its triumphs are greater. What happens ultimately, you do not know. In such circumstances what can you do but cultivate an utter indifference to all values? Nothing matters. Nothing whatever...

If the ethical - that is, social morality - is the highest and if there is in a person no residual incommensurability in some way such that this incommensurability is not evil then no categories are needed other than what Greek philosophy had... and what their wisdom amounts to is the beautiful proposition that basically everything is the same.

Come work for me, and I'll tell you." My eyes went to his. "You are a thief, a cheat, a murderer, and a not-nice man," I said calmly. "I don't like you." He shrugged, the motion making him look utterly harmless. "I'm not a thief," he said. "And I don't mind manipulating you into working for me when I need it." He smiled, showing me perfect teeth. "I enjoy it, actually.

Breaking rules isn't bad when what you're doing is more important than the rule itself

There is black. There is white. Gray is a cowardly excuse to mix our wants with our needs.

Was using "dead-man's-toe" morally okay if the man's relatives had knowingly sold him for parts?

Piscary killed people, but he didn't have the concept of pity or remorse. It would be like telling a shark he was a bad fish and to stop eating people. But Trent? He knew he was doing wrong, and he did it anyway.

Witches married outside their species all the time, especially before the Turn. There were perfectly acceptable options: adoption, artificial insemination, borrowing your best friend's boyfriend for a night. Issues of what was morally right and wrong tended not to matter when you found yourself in love with a man you couldn't tell you weren't human. It sort of went with the whole hiding-among-humans-for-the-last-five-thousand-years thing.

It wasn't that the dark side was stronger, but that everything was the dark side. All magic was inherently wrong, and it was only us fooling ourselves that some of it was good, some of it was bad. Magic…just was.

Not everything was legal, but nothing was immoral, and that was my guide these days.

You need someone a little dirty, honey, with a heart of gold," she whispered in my ear as she patted my back. "I don't think you're going to find it in this century. We don't make honest men who are that strong in their convictions anymore. Society seems to just…twist them bad.

It's harder to fall in love with a man when he's killing people.

Just what I need. My own personal shoulder devil, wearing black and smelling like the Garden of Eden.

If you're somewhere new every day, you feel no accountability. You don't care who you hurt. You do what you want and damn the rest because you won't be there for the fallout.

Shades of gray, I thought, knowing I was slipping into places I had vowed I'd never go.

It's the love of right lures men to wrong.

What's the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot.

This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.

Sometimes I think it's only post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.

But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.