Quotes About Morality

What counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

True humility--the basis of the Christian system--is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

We have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory they have no power over the substance of original justice.

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

Perhaps justified violence is better than peace at any price.

It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse.

What we need," he wrote, "is to turn out of colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of right; not young men who can make a good argument for either right or wrong, as their interest bids them.

Some people really think that great wealth makes crime respectable, and if it is pointed out to a wealthy but dishonest man, that he is merely a common thief, and if in addition, the fact is proved to everybody's satisfaction, his anger is noticeable.

I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business.… No amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.