Quotes About Morality

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

Don't underrate ordinary human decency," Josh said quietly. "There's more of heaven in a guy who hands a cold soda to a hot, tired panhandler than there is in fifty moral philosophers.

The good die young — because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity", thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity," thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

Let us revise our views and work from the premise that all laws should be for the welfare of society as a whole and not directed at the punishment of sins.

The New Testament takes no demonstrable position on homosexuality. To suggest that Paul's references to excesses of sexual indulgence involving homosexual behavior are indicative of a general position in opposition to same-sex eroticism is as unfounded as arguing that his condemnation of drunkenness implies opposition to the drinking of wine.

We must never settle for harmony at the expense of holiness, nor for peace at the expense of principal.

In truth, much of human social life—our morality, our relationships—revolves around challenges posed by intertemporal choice.

You may know that a prisoner's guilt is independent of whether you're hungry or not, but she'll still seem like a better parole candidate when you've recently had a snack.

Are humans ever really capable of regarding others as ends in themselves?

people judge people as less moral when they act altruistically and gain in the process than when they gain from clearly nonaltruistic behavior.

people view "tainted altruism" as worse than no altruism at all.

Our brains trick us into thinking that we have Moral Truth on our side when in fact we don't, and blind us to important truths that our brains were not designed to appreciate.

Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted.

The science of morality requires us to, in the end, get beyond the myth of a perfectly objective scientific morality.

January 18, 1953: I am now definitely committed [to Minerals & Chemicals] for not less than three more years … and morally committed to see the thing through. While I can't conceive that this business will ever seem enough, an end of itself, to make up a satisfactory life, yet the busy-ness, the activity, the crises, the gambles, the management problems I must face, the judgment about people, all combine to make something far from dull.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

It's the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they'll be trodden on.

The true test of a man's character is not how he treats his friends, but how he treats his enemies.