Quotes About Morality

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you're not getting the whole thing that's there to be had.

I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.

People of character do the right thing, not because they think it will change the world but because they refuse to be changed by the world.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Let our lives be in accordiance with our convictions of right, each striving to carry out our principles

I've always wanted to do right in life. But the wanting and the doing aren't quite the same thing.

We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.

Having killed God, the atheist is left with no reason for being, no morality to espouse, no meaning to life, and no hope beyond the grave.

I want every fan of Rand to hear [Polaha] say the classic Galt phrase: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Each one of us has both; good and evil virtues. Those who decide to focus on the good ones succeed in life.

You cannot succeed in one department of life while cheating on another, life is an indivisible whole.

But rather than looking forward to reading that account, I felt as if I were stealing a private diary that had been locked by his death.

Thieves slept the sleep of the just, their fingers still in someone else's till.

There had never been a time when all the people everywhere lived in peace. No one had ever had a lasting peace without ignoring atrocity or history, which meant it wasn't lasting at all. Which meant we were an irrational species.

We were assholes and opportunists and sociopaths, a lot of us. We thought we were on the right side of things. But what did it mean that our clients resembled ghouls and grave robbers? I knew their families, or photos of their families

He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other.

No man is above justice," George Mason preached at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. That sentiment still rings true, yet competes with the political reality offered by then-representative Gerald Ford, who quipped in 1970 that "an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.

Making a million legally has always been difficult. Making a million illegally has always been a little easier. Keeping a million when you have made it is perhaps the most difficult of all.

He was a good con man, but not a great con man. He wasn't ruthless enough. He had all the tricks, all the techniques, the facility for it. That part if you'll excuse the expression, was in his blood. But he never really had the heart for it.

As Schell had taught me, "a con starts when there is something you want and you are blocked from attaining it by certain obstacles. The good con artist elicits the assistance of those who mean to stand in the way of one's attainment by appealing to their vanity, pride, jealousy, ignorance, or fear. One must first throw into a pile the expected rules of engagement, morality, society, and thought, set them on fire, and then proceed. Think big, have confidence.

Illegal' takes on a whole new meaning when you're loaded like Barnes. The rich have a separate rule book. To them if it makes money, it can't be wrong.

Great people have great values and great ethics.

Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong - which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed they just fail to act on that knowledge.