Quotes About Morality

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.

Ninjo and giri must be balanced. They are a circle, the yin and the yang. If one is too strong, the balance is broken. You must strive to maintain the balance.

turned smoking from a marginal indulgence of questionable morality to an unobjectionable mark of stalwart manhood.

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

Once a person exists, not everything compatible with his overall existence being a net plus can be done, even by those who created him. An existing person has claims, even against those whose purpose in creating him was to violate those claims.

Maximising the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average.

If someone picks up a third party and throws him at you down at the bottom of a deep well...may you use your ray gun to disintegrate the falling body before it crushes and kills you?

Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls' theory or explain why not.

Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.

including Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and popularizers such as Archibald Alison, elaborating on sensibility and

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

Everyone misbehaves,' said Eddie. 'That's nature. Everyone gets away with as much as they can get away with. And the more they can get away with, the more they will.

Omally, as ever, slept the sleep of the just, which was quite unjust of him, considering he had no right to do it.

I know little of the Catholic faith,' said Pooley, 'who was Pope Alexander VI?' 'He was not what one would describe as a good egg,' said Omally.

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.

In today's society, we have lost the concept of doing something because it is the right thing to do. Instead, we do things in exchange for some reward or favor, or to avoid punishment. Wouldn't it be novel to do something simply because it is the right thing to do? God's commands are holy, right, and good, and the Holy Spirit gives us the wisdom and strength to keep them. Therefore, since they have value in themselves, we can choose to obey God and follow His commands.

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil

A great majority of Terrans were idealists, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy, and the like. And not only did they believe, they also let those noble concepts guide their actions—except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable. When that happened, they acted expediently, but continued to talk moralistically. This meant that they were "hypocrites" —a term which every race has its counterpart of.

If justice really existed, there would be no need for law.

Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that's in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.

Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust.

I begin to see', he said to Virginia Woolf in 1934, 'that our generation -yours & mine… owed a great deal to our fathers' religion. And the young… who are brought up without it, will never get so much out of life. They're trivial: like dogs in their lusts. We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Xty & yet had its benefits.

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.