Quotes About Morality

Love also means the freedom to follow your own conscience. If you can't be true to yourself, you don't have much left to give anyone else.

The time will come when we ourselves are disliked or misunderstood, or strangers, different from our judges in race or class or creed, and if their sense of justice depends upon their passion rather than their morality, who is to speak for us then, or defend our right to the truth?

there are none as virtuous as those who have never been asked.

Oi didn't loike that bloke, Captain. Bastard, 'e were, but Oi s'pose rules is for them yer don't loike. Yer won't 'urt them as yer do. In't that what God's about, been fair to them as rubs your coat all the wrong way?

After all, what healthy man, woken in his bed in the morning by a young, clear-skinned, well-rounded wench bending over him, would not be tempted?

That you have one set of rules for yourselves, and another for us

Crime must be paid for, but not all sins or mistakes need be made public and explained for everyone to examine and remember. And sometimes victims were punished doubly, once by the offense itself, and then a second and more enduring time when others heard of it, pored over it, and imagined every intimate detail.

A woman alone is subject to temptations of the flesh, to lightmindedness and entertainments that by their very shallowness tend to pervert the nature.

You do not need to believe evil, only to use its methods. You will get accustomed to them, until eventually they are not your last choice, but your first. For awhile, you can justify it to yourself, and then eventually you will not bother. You have forgotten what you are fighting for; now winning is the only objective! And the more you win, the more you justify it, until the whole idea of right and wrong disappears and only winning matters.

Which was worse, to intrude or to pretend not to have seen, because you had no idea what to do?

What you see, and allow without a fight, is what you become yourself. What is the moral difference between the man who burns his neighbor to death, and the man who stands by and watches him do it?

And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.

I was good and bad, but never wicked.

Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.

I am not times fool, nor a god hardened by the millennia; I am not the trickster in the black cape nor the sorrowful wanderer. I have a conscience. I know right from wrong I know what I do and yes, I do it. I am the Vampire Lestat. That's your answer do with it as you will.

When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.

My conscience is killing me, isn't it? And when you're immortal that can be a really long and ignominious death

I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came over me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image - it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural.

so important to believe in a concept of goodness, even if we make it up ourselves. We don't really make it up. it's there, isn't it? Oh, yes, it's there, she said. It's there because we put it there.

Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?

But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.

I saw these men and knew what they wanted, that this was vice, and despicable, and the price of it was Hell.

Our way–the Western Way–has always been a work in progress. Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy–these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.

But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren't there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn't smell the scent of evil; they didn't hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.