Quotes About Morality

A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

There is no God. But it does not matter. Man is enough.

La pregunta es esta, mi amigo: ¿hay tantos hijos de puta como uno cree, o la influencia de los hijos de puta sobre sus semejantes es mayor que la de la gente buena, y es por eso que uno cree que son más que los que en realidad son?

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

When life is cheap death is rich.

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.

A pretty girl can do no wrong.

The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.

In demonstrating that humans behave with justice, tolerance, reason, love toward other forms of life, we are doing no more than demanding that humans be human -- that is, be true to the best aspects of human nature. Humans being human, therefore, cannot consider themselves morally superior to, say, bears being bear-like, eagles being eagle-like, etc.

Those who have no sense of posterity or any concern for future generations are the ones who are really dead. I mean, they are dead right now. Walking zombies.

If the end does not justify the means - what can?

In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or power will keep a mistress and a few girlfriends on the side. Only in America, still suffering from its grotesque, hypocritical Puritan heritage, do we persist in attempting to deny and repeal a million years of basic primate biology.

I shall never sacrifice a friend to an ideal. I shall never desert a friend to save an institution. I shall never betray a friend for the sake of the law. Great nations may fall in ruin before I shall sell a friend to preserve them. I pray to the God within me to give me the power to live by this design.

Reason is and ought to be, as Hume said, the slave of the passions.

The gross evil of our time defies all labels.

It would be like murder; and where would I set my coffee?

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ..... eventually ..... fall.

As for the comparatively small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant and bestial; and in these days, when education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of.

Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.