Quotes About Morality

What do you do,' he said, 'if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everyone tells you not to worry, you can't do anything about it, it was a long time ago?' She was looking at him in a different way. 'I suppose you go crazy.' 'Or worse. Sane.

No one who ever follows their conscience ever does wrong. The consequences may not turn out as we intended; it may prove that we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong.

Once, in the early ages, Satan's attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes at once.

it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude.

that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.

The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.

These tests imply an even more fundamental lesson that runs through this book: the difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know.

But those who are incapable of pitying animals are, as a matter of fact, incapable of pitying men. A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces -- laying bare the nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out with forceps -- would not hesitate to try experiments with men and women for the gratification of his curiosity.

I have made up my mind that if there is a God, he will be merciful to the merciful. Upon that rock I stand. – That he will not torture the forgiving. – Upon that rock I stand. – That every man should be true to himself, and that there is no world, no star, in which honesty is a crime. Upon that rock I stand. The honest man, the good woman, the happy child, have nothing to fear, either in this world or the world to come. Upon that rock I stand.

Virtue is a subordination of the passions to the intellect. It is to act in accordance with your highest convictions. It does not consist in believing but in doing. Collected works volume 1

People who love their enemies should, at least, tell the truth about their friends.

I can't ever let the actions of other people cause me to sin.

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one.

Something I've never been able to adapt to, to understand, is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter.

Henry David Thoreau, whom Gandhi read, declared, "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." Havel, Gandhi, and Thoreau sought to live out humane truths that challenged the falsehoods imposed upon them by what they perceived as the malignant normality of their societies.

In a society that rejects absolute truth, the only vice that cannot be tolerated is the sin of intolerance.

Those four effects described above—shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality, initiating victims, contributing to difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality, and providing a training manual for abusers—are at work just as much with men who have not engaged in activities that meet the legal definition of rape. Here we have to let go of a comforting illusion—that there is some clear line between men who rape and men who don't, between the bad guys and the good guys.

But men often mistake killing and revenge for justice. They seldom have the stomach for justice.

Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.' Not the noblest, one never knows what that is. But the nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made.

Don't worry. Don't worry. The Devil does none of these things. He neither smokes nor drinks nor engages in revelry, and yet he is The Devil. --Father Vasiliev, confessor to the Russian Imperial Family

For to tempt and to be tempted are things very nearly allied.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

While the emergence from embeddedness in the interpersonal frees one from the subjectivity of constructing one's morality on the bases of arbitrary affections and empathies, the new stage is subject to its own arbitrariness. In constructing that which subtends or coordinates the interpersonal it is likewise embedded in that constructions, the social order or social group.