Quotes About Morality

But faith is still the mother of hatred here, as it is wherever people define their moral identities in religious terms.

Funny or not, the story reveals something distasteful about Sita: She will lie when it suits her needs.

Jerry Falwell

what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it.

Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.

Your principal concern appears to be that the Creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery of yours contributes daily to the surplus of human misery.

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

Antonin Scalia

Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral….

A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about happiness and suffering of sentient creatures

The link between religion and "morality"—so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated—is fully belied here, as it is wherever religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion.

Can we rely on the authority of the pope? Millions of Catholics do, of course. He is, in fact, infallible in matters of faith and morality. Can we really say that Catholics are wrong to believe that the pope knows whereof he speaks? We surely can.

Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. It is a failure of ethics.

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. If

Once a person accepts the premises upon which most religious identities are built, the withdrawal of his moral concern from those who do not share these premises follows quite naturally.

Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems.

You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults—and even to discourage your own sons and daughters from having premarital sex—are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering.

Faith is like a pockpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.

Take Tamar, for instance. She disguises herself as a harlot and sleeps with her own father-in-law, just to prove what a hypocrite he is.

When Ruth spots a man she likes, she gets him drunk, strips off his clothes, and hops into bed with him. When he wakes up the next morning, he has no choice but to marry her. And

The thing is, I am absolutely convinced that the only way we can improve one another's quality of life, which is something very real to those of us who grew up in the Depression, is through what we call free enterprise—practiced correctly and morally.

You're never wrong to do the right thing

Be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.