Quotes About Morality

the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." And

The American poet Vachel Lindsay declaimed:   Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

Only half a dozen years earlier Stanley had deserted from the U.S. Navy, but now he noted with satisfaction how "the incorrigible deserters . . . were well flogged and chained.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: "We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?" When

Sir Archibald Bodkin (best known to history as the man who later would get James Joyce's novel Ulysses banned from publication in postwar England), thundered accusingly that "war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong.

Traders kept careful records of their booty. One surviving inventory from this region lists "68 head" of slaves by name, physical defects, and cash value, starting with the men, who were worth the most money, and ending with: "Child, name unknown as she is dying and cannot speak, male without value, and a small girl Callenbo, no value because she is dying; one small girl Cantunbe, no value because she is dying.

Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.

You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path.

Stealing is good, honest work, Said the theif, puffing out his chest. Well, not honest, strictly speaking, he admitted after a moment. Or actually good.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.

The profligacy of a man of fashion is looked upon with much less contempt and aversion, than that of a man of meaner condition.

When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?

In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence.

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least . . . abstain from robbing and murdering one another.

Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it.

a man within the breast...

The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despite, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

Two different sets of philosophers have attempted to teach us this hardest of all the lessons of morality. One set have laboured to increase our sensibility to the interests of others; another, to diminish that to our own. The first would have us feel for others as we naturally feel for ourselves. The second would have us feel for ourselves, as we naturally feel for others.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

manner, to the selfish and original