Quotes About Morality

In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders

and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Morality came before religion, and religion was our ancestors' way of responding to that built-in need. And if that was so, then it was perfectly possible to lead a good life, to have a strong sense of right and wrong, without ever letting God and his harpies into the room.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say.

The leisure class, a.k.a. the landed gentry, on whom my business depends," he told Geronimo Manezes, "are the hunters, not the gatherers; they make their way by the immoral road of exploitation, not the virtuous path of industry. But I, to make my way, have to treat the rich as the good guys, the lions, the creators of wealth and guardians of freedom, which naturally I don't mind doing because I'm an exploiter too and I also want to think of myself as virtuous.

What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don't know the answer to such questions anymore.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me.

The crux of a great person's life is the choice between doing what is right and what he wants to do. Abraham Lincoln, who was a proficient wrestler and enjoyed a good bout, probably would have preferred spending his time on the mat to starting a war in which approximately two per cent of the population died

by your example you have taught me kindness, and shown me that it expands to include all people, not only the true believers but the unbelievers and other-believers also, not only the virtuous but also those who know not virtue

Montgomery Clift in I Confess?

He was a heartless monster, she told him; did he not understand—O abominable one!—that human life was short and that each day of love stolen from it was a crime against life itself?

El verdadero atractivo del mal es la seductora facilidad con la que uno puede aventurarse por ese camino

Perhaps it was wrong to lie with her. Another duty, another obligation, another potential source of guilt. Was I lying to her in lying with her?

Then how unconfident of Itself this Deity was, Who didn't want Its finest creations to know right from wrong; and Who reigned by terror, insisting upon the unqualified submission of even Its closest associates, packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of Hell ...

Is the truth too poor a thing for us? Is any man innocent of embellishing it at times, or even of abandoning it entirely?

Desde el principio, los hombres han utilizado a Dios para justificar lo injustificable.

Aurora's studio she stole three charcoal sketches of me as a young boy, sketches in which my ruined hand had been wondrously metamorphosed, becoming, variously, a flower, a paintbrush and a sword. Miss Jaya took these sketches to my Dilly's flat and said they were a gift from the 'young Sahib'. Then she told Aurora that she had seen the teacher pinching them, and, excuse me, Begum Sahib, but that woman's attitude to our boy is not a moral one.

The question is, do you mean to do right by her? Do you mean well by her? Or is your desire so great that it overwhelms your sense of the right and the good?

Conscience never dies the cricket said There will always be a cricket for those who deserve, who are worthy.

An ancient Jewish teaching holds that to save a life is to save the whole world.

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.

You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible - and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world.

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.