Quotes About Morality

But prove to me that one who holds inferior judgments can prevail over a man who is superior in his judgments. You never will prove it, nor anything like it; for the law of nature and of god is this: Let the better always be superior to the worse… Thus I, too, lost my lamp to a thief because the thief was better at keeping awake than I. But he bought a lamp at the price of being a thief, a rogue, and a brute. That seemed to him a good bargain. Epictetus

If anything except the honourable is good, we shall be hounded by greed for life, and by greed for the things which provide life with its furnishings, – an intolerable state, subject to no limits, unstable. The only good, therefore, is that which is honourable, that which is subject to bounds.

What's odd in asserting that what's bad for anything is what runs contrary to its nature? You say it for everything else, why make humanity the sole exception?

A bad person's character cannot be trusted, it's weak and indecisive, easily won over by different impressions at different times.

Consider at what price you sell your integrity; but please, for God's sake, don't sell it cheap.

He didn't care; it was not his skin he wanted to save, but the man of honour and integrity. These things are not open to compromise or negotiation.

Life offers more than one option for doing the right thing.

Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. "They are just what we would be in their situation

For Genovese, slave owners' moral commitment to slavery was the foundation of a distinctive worldview that explained secession and the creation of the Confederacy.

Look after goodness and truth, beauty will look after herself.

Empathy, alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

It has been often said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts.

though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.

Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.

they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world.

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.

En términos morales, los imperios siempre se han justificado a sí mismos, y en ocaciones no sin una cierta sinceridad, tanto cuando afirmaban que llevaban (su versión de) civilización o la religión a unos pueblos sumidos en la ignorancia, como cuando decían llevar (su versión de) la libertad a los oprimidos (por otro imperio) o, en la actualidad, cuando se presentan como los campeones de los derechos humanos.

Even the righteous man is just a sinner living in between sins.

even the righteous man is just a sinner livin in between sins!

SLUT (noun): A woman with the morals of a man

Y'all going to hell in gasoline thongs.

To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the unexamined life is not just less good; it's useless.

E vinovat de adulter? Atunci e vinovat si de casatorie. Cum se poate merge in fata unui primar sau a unui preot pentru a primi garantia ca niciodata un barbat nu se va atinge de alta femeie decat de nevasta lui? Ce om in toate mintile va sustine asa ceva altfel decat constrans? Oprobiul meu se indreapta impotriva casatoriilor si juramintelor de castitate, nu impotriva adulterului, care mi se pare o desteptare sanatoasa a naturii.

Le mal est un mystère plus profond que le bien car, dans le bien, il y a une lumière, un dynamisme, une affirmation de la vie. Comment peut-on choisir l'obscur.