Quotes About Morality

Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without a second thought

What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness?

De peur d'avoir à naturaliser la morale, on moralise la Nature, on feint de confondre l'ordre politique et l'ordre naturel, et l'on conclut en décrétant immoral tout ce qui conteste les lois structurelles de la société que l'on est chargé de défendre.

Public infamy must restrain what the laws cannot.

The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people," he told Morris. "In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.

From the outset, Rockefeller had to wrestle with the demons of pride and greed.

I don't see any harm myself in making a little money, provided that it can be done honestly and reasonably.

To live with his own conscience, he told his father, he had to resign from the trust and devote his life to philanthropy.

Perhaps he did not think Junior could live with the moral ambiguities of a fortune extracted by dubious methods.

perhaps he had so thoroughly rationalized his own behavior that he saw himself in the same glowing, virtuous light as his son did.

Not "unless we find out . . . they have done something we regard as wrong

The man born without honor placed a premium on maintaining his.

paederasty is somehow no qualification of

He wouldn't take a baby," I said. "Child," Georgia said, "evil ain't got no roof.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs— as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

Why? In the days of Jeremiah, God said, "I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall; for from the prophets of Jerusalem profaneness has gone out into all the land" (Jeremiah 23:15 NKJV). The prophets of Jerusalem should have been decrying evil by giving out the pure water of the Word, but they were catering to the morally corrupt by giving out the poisoned water of false doctrines. Hence, God judged them. What

can do something about crime. Not a lot, I admit, but something. Because crime, all crime, is irrational. It is opposed to the logic of life, and so it is evil. And that is why I became a cop.

when good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.

If peace was really within reach wasn't it immoral to fail?

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.

Reverence for Life," he wrote. Ethics, Schweitzer decided, was nothing more than that. "Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.

He said all that needs to happen for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.

Because mistakes of a certain type have the kind of consequences that people with consciences don't like to live with.

You produce the right results for the wrong reasons, then." I nodded. "But I try to do the right thing. I think the reasons don't really matter. Whatever, I like to see the right thing done.