Quotes About Morality

Good ends, as I have frequently to point out, can be achieved only by the employment of appropriate means. The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief.

The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and economics. So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions.

Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor.

The Lord's Prayer is less than fifty words long, and six of those words are devoted to asking God not to lead us into temptation.

The silent bear no witness against themselves.

As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve.

I'm not denying their kindness," said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue.

Chastity: The most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

the good that I would,'" he quoted, "'I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.

They seemed to have imagined that scientific progress could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest secondary and subordinate.

I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.)

The untutored egotist merely wants what he wants. Give him a religious education, and it becomes obvious to him, it becomes axiomatic, that what he wants is what God wants, that his cause is the cause of whatever he may happen to regard as the True Church and that any compromise is a metaphysical Munich, an appeasement of Radical Evil.

No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous.

And yet our personal experience and the study of history make it abundantly clear that the means whereby we try to achieve something are at least as important as the end we wish to attain. Indeed they are even more important. For the means employed inevitably determine the nature of the result achieved; whereas, however good the end aimed at may be, its goodness is powerless to counteract the effects of the bad means we use to reach it.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.

Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash-it makes one vomit.

Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city.

A people's theology reflects the state of it's children's bottoms.

the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?

There was something called Christianity.

God is Dipa's alibi. Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash—it makes one vomit.