Quotes About Morality

hous vivons aux temps des assassins —"we live in days of assassins"—where evil is sought in lives more than good in order to justify a world with a bad conscience.

The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just such a perversion of the due order of things.

the right to self-preservation could become egotism, and the power of generation could become license

Three dominant evils prevailed—clerical concubinage, simony

We lose our souls not only by the evil we do but also by the good we leave undone.

What happened on that Good Friday morning was that through propagandists the people became the masses. A democracy with a conscience became a mobocracy with power. When a democracy loses its moral sense, it can vote itself right out of democracy.

If sex does not mount to heaven, it descends into hell. There is no such thing as giving the body without giving the soul.

It meant nothing to teach men to be good unless He also gave them the power to be good

Some faces are never so gay as when regaling a scandal, which the generous heart would cover and the devout heart pray over.

Just as there are those who believe we should change morality to suit our amorality, so there are those who believe we should change God to suit our godlessness.

Perhaps the solicitation to pamper the way men live is too strong for them, for much of the business of philosophy at the present time seems to be to give high-sounding names to cover the sins of men. The clay is now molding the potter and the marble carving out the sculptor.

The greatest inhumanity that can be ascribed to men is having an opportunity for doing good to others and doing nothing. The serious sin is not always one of commission, but omission.

The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.

There are some corrupt Christians who do their business with female donkeys.

Voices and faces aren't manifestations of good or bad.

But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence.

Calls for federal compensation for their freed slaves suggested that such confidence was not simply braggadocio in the face of the Yankees. Southerners still sincerely believed slavery a matter of property rights, not the immoral expropriation of the life and labor of another human being.7

Faced with defeat, they judged their actions against their consciences and ruled themselves righteous.

In that case there will be no danger of his performing any evil action, since he practises temperance and despises money: all evil actions that men undertake are done either at the prompting of greed or under the spell of pleasure

the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed

I think most people know inherently that good wins.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

What makes 'The Wire' a beautiful story is how true to life it is. In other shows, you have a good guy and a bad guy. In 'The Wire,' bad guys are trying to be good, good guys are doing bad. You have real life. The people who do bad get bad things done to them.

I think 'The Wire' is my all-time favorite TV show. It's so brilliant, the way it critiques society, and how it handles that everybody who gets power loses their moral code and stops going to the root of the problem and just tries to maintain their own power.