Quotes About Morality

His captors asked why he, a nonslaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied: "I'm fighting because you're down here."7

Too often, we think of sin as self-contained, point-in-time choices with no interconnection or momentum. But sin refuses to remain contained in the moment it is conceived.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?

the unpopularity of an obviously right action should not hinder the execution of an obviously right decision. My

Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers.

Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not.

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

Joy is the noblest human act. —ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

Guilt says, "I did a bad thing." Shame says, "I am a bad person.

Our sexuality, in a sense, touches everything we do, including the way we love, even when the sexual expression of that love is neither involved nor even contemplated. So to call a person's sexuality "objectively disordered" is to tell a person that all of his or her love, even the most chaste, is disordered. That seems unnecessarily cruel.

Twice a day, or at least once, make your particular examens. Be careful never to omit them. So live as to make more account of your own good conscience than you do of those of others; for he who is not good in regard to himself, how can he be good in regard to others?

I'm not saying it's wrong to kill, if you've got a good reason: Self-defense, financial gain, political advantage, or even just to stay in practice. Killing for a rational purpose is fine. Killing because you think it will make an invisible man in the sky treat you kindly when you're dead is deranged.

Holy' is a word used to conceal a great deal of nonsense," Blasphet

Don't you see the act of capturing and punishing another being is an act of force? It's impossible to enforce laws without violence. Some authority always wields the power to arrest, to imprison, and to execute. The sole purpose of law is to provide a moral gloss for the use of violence to bend others to the will of a higher authority.

those with the most passionate convictions can justify the most savage cruelties.

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.

He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain't tellin' nobody who He's for.

I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts - protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The true me, my spiritual core, slipped further and further from reach.

The best form of government is that which is most likely to prevent the greatest sum of evil.

Few are guided by principle any longer, only by what they prefer. "You have to decide what's right for you," we are told. In such a climate, the only remaining virtue is tolerance, and the only philosophies that are wrong are those that believe in truth.

as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships.

God's penis would still rank high among those vistas a priest and a nun could not comfortably share.