Quotes About Morality

The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation for goodness.

And the fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord's name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:16). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus 31:15). What is the punishment for cursing one's father or mother? Death again (Exodus 21:17). What is the punishment for adultery?

But you seem to have a very strong intuition, which I share, that we should consider honesty to be a nearly ironclad principle, because it is to everyone's advantage so much of the time, and it allows us to live the kinds of lives and maintain the kinds of relationships we want to have.

Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.

Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts you at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

ONE OF THE most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering.

came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly

Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.

Values are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures

a person who commits each of these sins with abandon.

Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity.

A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.

It is time we realized that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist.

Biblical worldview.

Well, let's make it simpler. Let's say we found a culture on an island somewhere that was removing the eyeballs of every third child. Would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being?

As an undergraduate at Stanford, I took a seminar that profoundly changed my life. It was called "The Ethical Analyst," and it was conducted in the form of a Socratic dialogue by an extraordinarily gifted professor, Ronald A. Howard.1 Our discussion focused on a single question of practical ethics: Is it wrong to lie?

religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.

What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm.

And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.

It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis.

Bertrand Russell