Quotes About Morality

More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off?

I personally feel that no human is a hero or a villain. All of us have our grey sides, and that is why grey interests me: because it's more human, more life-like.

The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.

We can ask ourselves why we invent God, and then, ten minutes later, we invent Satan - why? Because we need him; there's something fascinating about the other side of the coin.

Why is it that if you take advantage of a corporate tax break you're a smart businessman, but if you take advantage of something so you don't go hungry, you're a moocher?

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will.

He was afflicted by the thought that where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.

The book, '12 Rules For Life,' is a very serious book. There's elements of humor in it, but I'm trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it's necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there's hell to pay if you don't do that.

For most people, the question why be good - as distinguished from merely law abiding - is a simple one. Because God commands it, because the Bible requires it, because good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell.

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

I am sadly afraid that I must have done some wicked thing.

The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.

Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly.

Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.

Wicked people are always surprised to find ability in those that are good.

It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?

To err is human; but contrition felt for the crime distinguishes the virtuous from the wicked.