Quotes About Morality

I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.

The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.

Scripture also teaches that human beings are morally responsible creatures

Even the most normal people teeter all their lives along a narrow line between good and evil; between impulse and judgement, as we may say. Sleep does two things for the normal person. It gives him constant, long periods of respite from the conflict. It also enables his impulses to find a certain fulfilment in dreams, especially his most lawless impulses.

Classic is our daring, classic our cowardice. Classic is our cruelty, classic our charity.

Reciprocity is certainly not a good basis for a morality of aspiration. Yet it is more than just the morality of egoism. It

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Rand, Nozick, and their more modern incarnations are dangerously wrong. Not only does the common good exist, but it is essential for a society to function. Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn't even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn't even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent's attitudes. Parricide and incest ought not be. One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker.

those who cheat for you will cheat against you.

Abraham's willingness to plunge a dagger through the heart of his young son because God, without any explanation, ordered it. We learn in this story that the correctness of an action was not judged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.

the correctness of an action was not adjudged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.

Exodus 23:8–"And thou shalt take no gift; for a gift blindeth them that have sight and perverteth the words of the righteous.

Do not seek dishonest gains; dishonest

The meritocratic claim that people are paid what they are worth in the market is a tautology that begs the questions of how the market is organized and whether that organization is morally and economically defensible. In truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

One of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy," observed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, "is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

We're not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We're in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations.

What's truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults but what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us. America's problems have nothing to do with private morality. The breakdown is in public morality—abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.