Quotes About Morality

My policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.

It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. "Ethics" meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That's why it was called "golden," like the golden ratio.

Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.

Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.

Someone whose only reason for not acting in an antisocial way was that they were scared of getting in trouble with God . . . where did you even start with such a person?

What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

Respect for the dead comes second to respect for the living, and I believe no man's demise exempts him from culpability.

There are two ways to die here,' the fighter concluded. 'You can die doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or die doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

But it is often easier to compel a hundred people to do what you could never compel one person to do. The lone man must consult his conscience, that stern and unflattering arbiter. A man in a crowd, though, can turn to the others, as the others turn to one another, each justifying the deed by referring to the next man, or to the force of all the men together. This

I stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome's republican arteries, wrote that the study of his land's history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans "sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

Every single pagan philosopher of the ancient world said that if you wanted to be free, you had to learn the hard ways of virtue and that the worst form of slavery was slavery to your own appetites.

The good man," says Plato, "is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.

People with a strong sense of being embodied creatures, rather than being bundles of appetite provided with the machinery of a body to work upon, will prove difficult to persuade in the coming century of the biotechnocrats.

To imagine the world without gods and religion is reasonable enough; to imagine mankind without them is an entirely different matter.

Just because one is born in sin is no reason to brag about it.

We should be carefree with our bodies and prudish with our brains, not the contrary. How virtuous we are with our flesh, and yet the first foul thought that comes our way is invited to the depths of our soul.

When a scientist splits an atom, the event is locked away like a jewel in a castle, funneling down to the public through a myriad of institutions. But when an artist stumbles upon the key to unleashing universal evil, the forbidden fruit of his painstaking labor is packaged and sold at every corner store from Bangor to Bangkok. I'm still unsure whether this is the result of a lack of respect for artists (compared to scientists) or the moral corruption of artists (compared to scientists).

Sin is more than a stain that can be removed by a trip to the dry cleaner. It is a wound that needs to be treated, healed.

A rationalization a day keeps your conscience at bay.

A mad scientist builds a monster out of body parts. The monster heads into the woods and kills a little girl. Who, then, is most responsible? The mad scientist or the monster?" "The answer to that question is obvious, sir." "It is ?" "Of course, sir - it's neither the scientist nor the monster." "Then who is the most responsible?" "The little girl in the woods." "The little girl in the woods? " "For failing to adequately protect herself, sir.

Chinese were not simply great craftsmen and ingenious designers, they were also a deeply moral people. Ethics was their true strength, and theirs was an ethics that crucially eschewed metaphysical or theological speculation and adhered to education and conversation.

Thirdly, we have to raise human beings with a philosophy of ethics. If it's Judaism, wonderful, because it has a basic ethic. If it's Christianity, it has a basic ethic. But we have to raise people with a conscience.

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him. 

My morality and faith are choices. My sexual orientation however isn't.