Quotes About Morality

I do what he says and I close my eyes and open my mouth and the next thing I know he's got his twenty-eight-year-old tongue in my thirteen-year-old mouth and all I can think is that I don't think the hero is supposed to be doing this.

They were failing by the hundreds and thousands in their attempt to fill the shoes of a man like the Emperor, but she dared to call the Archive chaos. What did she call the mess the self-appointed Provisional Council was creating out there? What word did she have for the infinite loss of direction in the souls of the people whose lives they had destroyed? What word for the deterioration of morality, for the spreading degeneracy? How would she describe the results of their limitless failure?

Isn't suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis? If so, why make it a virtue?

And then there are the events of more recent history, beginning with the victory over apartheid, an analogy particularly popular in conjunction with divestment. 'Just as apartheid was the moral issue' of the late twentieth century, 'climate change is the moral issue of our time', McKibben has said, alluding to suffering in non-white peripheries of the world, and 'the same kind of tactic is what's necessary to face it'.

Martin Luther King – his moral compass a wonder of reliability next to Gandhi's – endorsed this distinction in his apologia for the urban riots of 1967: 'Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people',

Anti-Americanism is an emotion masquerading as an analysis, a morality, an ideal, even an idea about what to do. When hatred of foreign policies ignites into hatred of an entire people and their civilization, then thinking is dead and demonology lives. When complexity of thought devolves into caricature, intellect is close to reconciling itself to mass murder.

For the first time in history, the rational and the good are fully armed in the battle against evil. Here we finally find the answer to our paradox; now we can understand the nature of the social power held by evil. Ultimately, the evil, the irrational, truly has no power. The evil men's control of morality is transient; it lives on borrowed time made possible only by the errors of the good. In time, as more honest men grasp the truth, evil's stranglehold will be easily broken.

The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.

The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.

The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no motherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned the majority opinion, which included these immortal words: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

I am against the death penalty.

I do not believe," whispered Father Sunder, "in any God that considers love to be a sin.

I was learning it was possible to love more than just God. In fact, I was learning it was better to love more than just God.

Confronting this question takes us beyond a world where the line between good and evil is sharp and bright, into a gray confusion where navigation was soul-trying work.

And yet vile as it was, the fugitive slave law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists, both black and white, because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union, or (for Northerners) how to destroy slavery while preserving the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery.

Chinese authorities coveted a powerful and accurate 120mm cannon produced by the huge German conglomerate Rheinmetall. Mertins acquired the plans of the cannon and provided them to NORINCO.67 Such are the morals of the arms dealer: developed and nurtured by German Intelligence as the arms dealer of choice for shadowy transactions, Mertins was willing, only a decade later, to undermine the military capacity of his fatherland so as to support communist China.

No tragedy is greater than that of a single person who is afraid to do the right thing

Por esta razón el hombre fue creado al comienzo como una sola persona, para enseñarles que quienquiera que destruya una vida es considerado por las Escrituras como alguien que ha destruido un mundo entero; y quienquiera que salve una es como si hubiera salvado un mundo entero.