Quotes About Morality

Back then, just like now, whenever people look the other way when evil is around them, the wicked will find it.

It's as if you've already crossed over; the devil has won your soul. Additional stains don't matter. And yet this wasn't true for me. The idea of fudging my time and squeezing out more money for the work I had done hadn't even occurred to me. Did that mean I had successfully rationalized my adultery, that somehow what I was doing was not immoral and therefore I still had a lily-white soul to protect?

more unselfish than I had been. What was I doing now? Was I finally overcoming that? Were my needs demanding to be addressed, no matter what the potential risk? Was it my time? Did all adulterers go through a similar self-analysis or didn't they give it a second thought? It was certainly easier not to think about it. Could I do that? Could I avoid imagining Kelly's reaction when or if she found out?

Slavery was a tradition embedded in the culture of the South and played a key economic role there. Its economic importance was the key factor impending abolition. Nevertheless, slavery is morally reprehensible, and completely indefensible, and the fact that many Americans, including the Founding Fathers, recognized that it was wrong, in a way makes us even more responsible for the crimes committed against the African-American race.

Circulating libraries were denounced as purveyors of pornography and books of brain-rotting triviality.

I]t is necessary to make a man better not by force but by persuasion. We neither have authority granted us by law to restrain sinners, nor, if it were, should we know how to use it, since God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.

The idea of God is very useful,' Napoleon said, 'to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.

when an MP told him that the public demanded all-out bombing of German civilians, especially in Berlin, Churchill replied, 'My dear sir, this is a military and not a civilian war. You and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire (and have succeeded in our desire) to destroy German military objectives. I quite appreciate your point. But my motto is "Business before pleasure.

No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and wither he is going. – Napoleon

he demonstrated a flexibility of principle that verged on opportunism.

Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,' Napoleon would later write. 'The rabble must be moved by terror.

Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,' he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, 'but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct.

shrugged. "I believe she exists. I just don't particularly believe in praying to someone who sets up a system that kills thousands of teenagers every year.

Her (Jane Austen) moral message is infused with ideological insistence on the merits of good conduct, good manners, sound reason, and marriage as an admirable social institution. She never scorns love, but balances it often . . . with a firm advocacy of . . . the qualities of self-knowledge, self-discipline, and practicality.

Debt has become the means of subjecting everyone – from sovereign nations to homeowners and victims of payday loan sharks – to a mixture of ersatz morality and threats. Pay your debts or else you're a bad person or bad country, and so bad things will happen to you.35

People are simply incapable of prolonged, sustained goodness.

We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Here's why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.

Until recently, I never realized to what degree the middle class is a moral, rather than an economic, entity, based less on status than on possessive, life-sustaining love. The moral middle class plays life by percentages, because that is the safest bet, and percentage play—in life as in tennis—is by definition conservative.

Stealing to eat ain't criminal—stealing to be rich is.

Don't like fish. They eat drowned sailors – don't seem right to eat them in return.

The time to argue the pacifist cause is before or after a war, not during it. While our men are fighting it is not right for others to undermine them.

Do I want his dirty money, sir?" "No such thing, my boy! The man who earns it may be disgusting; the way he does it may be corrupt; but the gold shines clean and pure!

They are not demons, not devils... Worse than that. They are people.