Quotes About Morality

Makes me sick to think that I chose to become part of a system that can so easily and arbitrarily decide to destroy a man for doing exactly what was right.

the path to hell starts when we rob other people of their humanity. Once they stop being human, we can do what the hell we like to them. As long as we allow others to retain their humanity, we retain our own.

This guy could sell off half his classic car collection and secure the mortgages for at least a hundred families facing eviction because they can no longer afford the bills. ?But such is life, and who can blame James Wilson for playing by its rules? Even if they've always been stacked in his favor.

I can't really speak for the right, but it seems to me that people on the right are less bothered about a virtuous self-image.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, was above corruption so long as human beings were involved.

The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times.

The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times. (John Fiske)

THE RELIGIOUS PILGRIMS OPPOSED SLAVERY

Members of society must obey the law because they personally believe that its commands are justified.

Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentuous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically.

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place

To kill an animal in order to satisfy your nutritional desires, not your nutritional needs, that seems to me to be completely unacceptable.

Just as absent pleasures that do deprive are 'bad' in the sense of 'worse', so absent pleasures that do not deprive are 'not bad' in the sense of 'not worse'.

Epictetus: "Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting well-behaved man within you.

THOSE WHO STUDY the rise and fall of civilizations learn that no shortcoming has been as surely fatal to republics as a dearth of public virtue, the unwillingness of those who govern to place the value of their society above personal interest.

It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

What is a law, if those who make it Become the forwardest to break it?

Karl Marx disse que a religião é o ópio do povo, mas estava errado. A religião não é o ópio do povo, ela é o incendiário do povo! Nunca o mal é feito tão bem como quando é feito em nome da religião.

Nunca o mal é feito tão bem como quando é feito em nome da religião.

I turned on my heel and left the building. With only £4.76 in the bank, and my subscription to 'Men Only' due, things were looking bleak. Seeing that Keith Moore had apparently purloined Sting's money, though at this time, he had not been yet convicted of the offence, it seemed to me that he was a better bet for a loan than Sting was.

T]he end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary...

Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.