Quotes About Morality

Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822)

I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death . . . is the true measure of the Divine within us.

There is no such thing as a necessary evil.

Forgiveness doesn't make wrong things right. It remembers that what is right far outshines what is wrong.

our first responsibility is to remove the weeds from our own garden. We must take the high road ourselves before exhorting others to do so.

To be angered by evil is to partake of it, stupid. - Phrases of Import and Salvation, Chapter IX, The Book of Universal Truths and Other Humorous Anecdotes

Impossible for me to harm or, by omission of action, allow to be harmed a human being.

I have always considered Pascal's Wager a questionable bet to place, since any God worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.

With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines.

Michael, it's terrible to say so, but sometimes you have to weigh the cost of one man's life against the value of an entire operation.

it was disbelief in the universality of moral truth, and the failure to see that human beings are by nature capable of gaining access to moral truth, that created the intellectual perversions of pragmatism and positivism alike.

positivists were people without firm moral commitments and therefore without any means of resisting the dogmatic certainties of communism and fascism.

Lewis passionately believed that education is not about providing information so much as cultivating "habits of the heart"—producing "men with chests," as he puts it in his book The Abolition of Man, that is, people who not only think as they should but respond as they should, instinctively and emotionally, to the challenges and blessings the world offers to them.

In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged.

If the physical world were a novel, with the business of examining evil and good, it would not have the clear lines of Dickens but the shadowy ambiguities of Dostoevsky.

In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right an wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice.

For me the big questions about life are: 1. How should I live in the world? 2. Why should I live this way?

The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'SAVE US!'...and I'll look down and whisper 'No.

You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew... God doesn't make the world this way. We do.

I love you, but why must you love the law? 'Tis plain for all to see that she's a whore...that virtuous persons have no need to woo; that villains screw, then studiously ignore.

What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?

The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs. ... It´s us. Only us.

Adrian Veidt: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end. Dr. Manhattan: 'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.