Quotes About Morality

It was not," says Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, "very easy to be good then.

Werner is succeeding. He is being loyal. He is being what everybody agrees is good. And yet every time he wakes and buttons his tunic, he feels he is betraying something.

what I really wanted to do was write a story that was all backstory, in which multiple protagonists, none of whom are exactly likable, wake up, tell lots of different stories inside the story, argue significant moral points, then wake up a second time and realize the whole thing was a dream.

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

Is it right," Jutta says, "to do something only because everyone else is doing it?

Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.

To put the matter bluntly, no sense at all can be made of the virtue of purity if sodomy is countenanced or even celebrated. That is because the virtue is founded in reality, and the vice depends upon denying the reality.

These days we have no true childhood, only a diseased precocity, introducing children to things that any decent man of Whittier's day, or of Armstrong's, would have considered unutterably vile. Therefore we have no true adulthood either, only a prolonged infantility, a curdled adolescence followed by old age and death.

Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates;

There is no biological reason for sodomy. The body does not need it; society does not need it; in this sense it is not a sin involving the intemperate use of something good or morally neutral, nor is it a sin involving the misuse of such things. It is an act which by its nature frustrates the function of the organs of the body it employs.

We don't actually want our young people to encounter the mysteries of love anyway; best to keep them preoccupied with the tedium of lust instead. The

Justice is only what a "culture," meaning a shifting majority of people, say it is, with a dollop of respect for "human rights" spread on top, without intellectual foundation, and without any connection with virtue and duty.

The early Christians saw the connections quite clearly, which is why they set themselves apart from the licentiousness. They did not frequent houses of prostitution, they did not divorce, they did not kill their babies, and they did not engage in sexual perversion.

We see then that the principle of sexual autonomy is fundamentally antisocial. It not only retreats from social responsibility; it breeds social irresponsibility.

dubious means might subvert virtuous ends.

Supreme Good and Evil (De finibus)

Cicero's central concern is the contradiction between virtue and the inevitable expediencies that divert human agents from the path of right conduct.

Octavian merely replied: "That's a matter for the carrion birds to decide.

In feeling pudor, a Roman meditating self-destruction did not so much suffer from guilt at some bad thing he had done

virtue outweighs everything and even if the good man is not supremely happy, he is on balance happy.

Evil is not something instilled in a few unlucky persons by a malicious Lucifer. If we are to understand "evil" at all, we must think of it as a word—an emotional word—we use to describe actions performed by other humans that we experience as breathtakingly horrible, shocking, and, often enough, nauseating.

there is, he reasoned, no such thing as evil or suffering from God's point of view, and this explains why God never tries to do anything about it.

Just as nothing can be said to be either contrary to or in accordance with God's will, so nothing is either good or bad from God's perspective, which is to say from the point of view of nature or the universe as a whole:

God, or nature, has no use for such categories as good and bad.