Quotes About Morality

Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.

Don't compromise yourself - you're all you have.

Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.

Don't compromise yourself - you're all you have.

The ancient world assigned a value to divinely approved order similar to the value we assign to human rights.

They have forgotten these immortal words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor whose passion for truth drove him to confront Adolf Hitler and Germany:   Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.1.

for a fallen soul, an act of wrong could, at time, feel very right, and that scared the hell out of me.

I'm a killer, not a thief.

A dead cow or sheep lying in a pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of a carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher's stall passes as food.

It would be salutary, however, if we could retain our complacency in good conscience.

The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is going to live.

Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.

I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.

Boys do not fully know what is good and what is evil; they do wrong things at first almost innocently. Novelty hides vice from them; there is no one to warn them or give them rules; and they become slaves of sin, while they are learning what sin is.

The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.

The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. [...] This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.

He who is less than just is less than man.

We've reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy.

If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused.

If the tradition which claims that war may be justified does not also admit that it could be unjustified, the affirmation is not morally serious. A Christian who prepares the case for a justified war without being equally prepared for hte negative case has not soberly weighted the prima facie presumption that any violence is wrong until the case for an exception has been made.

accountability. Now there is a word with a solid – indeed a solemn – pedigree. The Good Book itself tells us that on the Day of Judgement everyone shall be required to give an account of themselves.

it's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.