Quotes About Morality

For when we lie nowadays it is not so much out of weakness as out of a conviction that a man cannot prevail in life unless he is able to lie.

E]in blasser, sozusagen grammatikalischer Schatten von Egoismus bleibt auf allem Tun haften, solange es keine Prädikate ohne Subjekte gebe.

D]iese skeptische Gegenwart glaubt weder an Gott noch an die Humanität, weder an Kronen noch Sittlichkeit - oder sie glaubt an alles zusammen, was auf das gleiche hinauskommt.

Moral war für ihn weder Botmäßigkeit, noch Gedankenweisheit, sondern das unendliche Ganze der Möglichkeiten zu leben.

A man of knowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will be revealed only at the end of time. Science is amoral. All our glorious thrusting of ourselves into the Unknown gets us out of the habit of being personally concerned with our conscience; in fact, it doesn't even give us the satisfaction of taking our conscience entirely seriously.

Via?a obi?nuit? este o stare intermediar? alc?tuit? din toate crimele de care suntem capabili.

A]lles ist moralisch, aber die Moral selbst ist nicht moralisch!

Is it actually the case that no one can tell you with any degree of authority when the life of a human being actually begins? No, it is not. Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.

we are rational animals, but we are imperfectly rational. We are prone to making intellectual and moral mistakes and capable of behaving grossly unreasonably—especially when deflected by powerful emotions that run contrary to the demands of reasonableness.

People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) There is always something. And I said, Maybe not on the Judge. And he said, Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

And he said, 'Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something...

For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.

We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity.

that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation

If supremacy of conscience means anything, it means that the inner integrity of the individual is more important than any mental construct. If love means anything, it means accepting others in their differences from oneself as well as in their similarities.

the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do

It was grace. In those who were always honest, the dlPFC, vlPFC, and ACC were in veritable comas when the chance to cheat arose. There's no conflict. There's no working hard to do the right thing. You simply don't cheat.

I suspect that it's because their belief system has segmented their world into a moral in-group and out-group so decisively that they're unconflicted about what they're doing. To them, the people they're killing are scarcely human. I think you share my concern about bad ideas being the malware that can get even psychologically normal people, biologically normal people, to do the unthinkable. How do you view this, in the context of your research?