Quotes About Morality

It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like 'God' and 'paradise' and ''sin' in the present that will determine our future.

Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers and better or worse ways to put them to use.

Any person who lies awake at night worrying about the private pleasures of other consenting adults has more than just too much time on his hands; he has some unjustifiable beliefs about the nature of right and wrong.

Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls, rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such

It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis. Any person who intentionally loosed such horrors upon the earth would be ground to dust for his crimes.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about

According to a recent poll, 36 percent of British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief.60 Are these people "morally motivated," in Haidt's sense, or just morally confused? And

to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

To see how fully our moral intuitions must shift, consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine that every relevant change in the human brain could now be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. In fact, the cure could be put directly into the food supply, like vitamin D. Evil would become nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.

Free will is an illusion.

Lying is the royal road to chaos.   As

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.

I do not remember what I thought about lying before I took "The Ethical Analyst," but the course accomplished as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced. I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork

To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.

When we played softball, I'd steal second base, feel guilty and go back.

Who you are as a person far outweighs what you do in an athletic arena.

I'm not playing with my brother-in-law today. Would you play with a man who improves his lie and cheats on his score? Well neither would he!

Strength of character is certainly needed to face life in the world and to stand by right principles, especially in the age in which we live.

No kid in the world, no woman in the world should ever raise a hand against a no-good daddy. That's already been taken care of: A Man Who Destroys His Own Home Shall Inherit the Wind.

The strength to kill is not essential for self-defence; one ought to have the strength to die.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.

There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.

It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.