Quotes About Morality

Good is the natural state of things. Evil is the absence of good.

Sometimes when I'm writing a superhero story I wonder if they really have to punch each other in the face. Is that really going to solve anything? I feel the same way sometimes when I watch episodes of Law & Order. I'm like, "Yeah, right. You found the sex offender and now everything is fine." TV is big on closure, but I think closure is horseshit in real life. I'm still haunted by stuff I did in my teen years when I think about it too much.

The Catholic thing. They've got you so tight inside you need an enema. No cheating on the wife, no cheating on the taxes, no cheating on the church. And somebody bends the rules a little, your panties get all bunched up.

Evil rules, and good men must needs be outlaws—or corpses—if they're to stay good. So

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The records do not show that Adam and Eve were married.

Drugs and stealing go together like bagels and lox.

Honesty is the most single most important factor having a direct bearing on the final success of an individual, corporation, or product.

Self-Consistency One of the first revisions proposed was the self-consistency interpretation of dissonance (Aronson, 1968, 1992). It is based on the idea that situations that evoke dissonance do so because they create inconsistency between the self-concept and a behavior. Because most persons have a positive self-concept, persons are likely to experience dissonance when they behave in a way that they view as incompetent, immoral, or irrational.

But with dogs, we do have "bad dog." Bad dog exists. "Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog!" The dog is saying, "Who are you to judge me? You human beings who've had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world!" "Well, if you put it that way, I think you've got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian.

Color does not say, once and for all, who we are and who we will forever be, nor does it accord anyone a different moral standing because they happen to be one color as opposed to another.

Power mattered. But in the end, for Jimmy, what kind of human beings we aspired to be mattered more. And I am convinced he was absolutely right, especially for our after times.

those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters.

Trump and his legions invoke a history to justify their belief in the value gap. In doing so, they stand in the long lineage of white people in the United States who have used a certain understanding of the past to reinforce the injustices of the present day. Baldwin's moral vision requires a confrontation with history—with slavery and with the ongoing consequences of the after times—shorn of the rosy tint of American innocence in order to overcome its hold on us.

People aren't good or bad. They just do good or bad things. Your only hope is to know which is which.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn't behoove any of us to speak evil of the rest of us

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

I want to be able, as days go by, always to look myself straight in the eye.

Suppose a boy steals an apple From the tray at the grocery store, And they all begin to call him a thief, The editor, minister, judge, and all the people – «A thief», «a thief», «a thief», wherever he goes. And he can't get work, and he can't get bread Without stealing it, why the boy will steal. It's the way people regard the theft of an apple That makes the boy what he is.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

You may tempt the upper classesWith your villainous demitasses,But Heaven will protect the working girl.

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.