Quotes About Morality

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

The Church calls people to be not spiritual mediocrities, but great saints, and this is why its moral ideals are so stringent. Yet the Church also mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute. To grasp both of these extremes is to understand the Catholic approach to morality.

To believe in God is sinful. Only those who KNOW God are without sin. John 10:15

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is an enabler.

Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.

I am used to hear bad men misuse the name of God, yet God exists.

This account of him [Thomas More] developed as I wrote: what first attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life in great variety and almost greedy quantities, who nevertheless found something in himself without which life was valueless and when that was denied him was able to grasp his death.

My master Thomas More would give anything to anyone. Some say that's good and some say that's bad, but I say he can't help it and that's bad... because some day someone's going to ask him for something that he wants to keep; and he'll be out of practice.

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons . . . And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, . . . the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down . . . do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I would give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."

Being told by way of aggravation, that he had eaten half a dozen plumbs, Nay truly, sister, (answers he simply to her) I have eaten half a score. So perfect an enemy was he to a lie, that he had rather accuse himself of another fault, than be suspected to be guilty of that.

The decision as to whether to risk one's actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is." from The structure of desire and recognition

Every lie is two lies — the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it.

You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.

There is an ongoing battle between conscience and self-interest in which, at some point, we have to take sides.

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone's feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.

Conscience is less an inner voice than the memory of a mother's glance.

You must question a code of ethics that never impedes your progress.

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.

Man, in his sensitivity, does not give names to animals he intends to eat but goes on giving names to children he intends to send to war.

Perchance God will pity a race that sought the better angels of its nature and found only its lesser demons.

[T]he devil... seldom leads people astray anymore, finding it easier to just follow along in their footsteps.

If there be no God, then what is truth but the average of all lies.

Sometimes, to do the right thing, we must keep a promise we never made.