Quotes About Morality

I think you can do something bad, and it doesn't make you a bad person. We are not defined by any one choice. We are the sum of our experiences, and we can make a bad choice and turn around and do better.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

In the summer or fall of 1974, I read some books about factory farming, and decided that I wanted no part of it.

It is true that the Puritans banned all recreation on Sundays and all games of chance, gambling, bear baiting, horse racing, and bowling in or around taverns at all times. They did so, not because they were opposed to fun, but because they judged these activities to be inherently harmful or immoral.

What I always liked about 'Sunny' whenever it approached any sort of hot-button issue is that, ultimately, what the characters felt about it could change at any given instant depending on what benefited them the most personally.

Aufklärung heißt nichts anderes, als die Unschuld messen mit dem Maaße der Schuld!

War demoralizes those who are trained for it. It brutalizes men of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality. Its path of glory is foul with the passions of lust, and red with the blood of murder. This is not the pathway to our goal

Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.

Would you like to resurrect God to take responsibility?" He shook his head. "No, Brother, we have to make such decisions ourselves.

Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.

When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.

Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.

Doing well is a result of doing good.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.