Quotes About Morality

While both [Plato and truth] are dear, piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.

Evil draws men together.

Let us be well persuaded that everyone of us possesses happiness in proportion to his virtue and wisdom, and according as he acts in obedience to their suggestion.

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

The wicked have no stability, for they do not remain in consistency with themselves; they continue friends only for a short time, rejoicing in each other?s wickedness.

We must as second best...take the least of the evils.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.

There is no higher value in our society than integrity.

The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt

Es cierto... Hay un momento en la vida en que tenemos necesidad de ser canallas, de ensuciarnos hasta adentro, de hacer alguna infamia, yo qué sé... de destrozar para siempre la vida de un hombre... y después de hecho eso podremos volver a caminar tranquilos.

A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right . . . Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

We conduct our lives according to our sense of right and wrong. We somehow possess an awareness of what we "ought" to do. When we fail to do what we "ought," a part of our mind we call "conscience" evokes an unpleasant feeling we call "guilt." Is that feeling—present in almost all individuals—an indication of a God-given moral law? Or does it simply reflect what we have been taught by our parents?

When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right . . . Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

I get paid large sums of money to kill children.

We're gonna be … I mean people like you and me … we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.

Ich ? : Atheist, allerdings ! : Wie jeder anständige Mensch !

a life in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life; and that conduct can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily examination, reflection, and resolution.

Success is simple. Do what's right, the right way, at the right time.

I dunno…maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!

Maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!

Of course clergymen and other paid teachers and moralists admonished us to be upright and unselfish, and for people with good incomes it was easy to condemn those living on the edge of poverty as inferior, impractical, shiftless, and lacking respect for the social code. It was easy to shout thief at the other fellow when you had no temptation to steal-I mean steal in a petty way. But stealing in a big way was often accepted as good business judgment.