Quotes About Morality

Denial is a normal response to evil.

Algunas veces, ser buena madre está reñido con ser buena persona.

A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.

How attraction works, making one's body almost painfully alive and one's thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions - they have their own morality and nothing else matters.

Ich musste gerade an Miss Milliment denken, die oft von einem Spruch aus ihrer Kindheit erzählt hat. 'Sei gut, liebes Mädchen, Klugheit lass die andren lernen.' Das hat sie immer richtig wütend gemacht. Sie hat gesagt, schon mit zehn wollte ihr nicht einleuchten, warum Gutsein ein Ersatz für Klugheit sein sollte. Aber es könnte ein Ersatz fürs Glücklichsein sein, oder?

He always -- or always tried -- to do things from larger principles, not out of what he felt about people, or any particular people, but what he thought people ought to feel about -- humanity. He wasn't really interested in people singly or personally.

Right and wrong, I learned that day, could not really be taught after all, only felt.

The man who enlists into the service for a consideration, and deserts the moment he receives his money but to repeat the play, is bad enough; but the men who manipulate the grand machine and who simply make the bounty-jumper their agent in an outrageous fraud are far worse. They are beneath the worms that crawl in the dark hidden places of earth.

Once you've postponed doing what's right, you become a big part of what's wrong.

Something I've learned: once you postpone doing what's right, you become a big part of what's wrong.

Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

He is disgusted not only by the whores of his city but also by the "wicked" sexuality of women in general.

it appears that my bourgeois education inculcated hopelessly false notions of taste and morality, and along with them the pressing need to disseminate them by leadership. By the time I was mature enough to ofer them, society had developed and no longer felt in need of my mildewed fruits.

If you save yourself for marriage, and then you don't get married, then what you saved isn't worth anything. It's like Confederate money. You're bankrupt, you have nowhere to spend it." Caroline to Peggy

It's possible to like bad people, but liking them doesn't make them good.

We do not argue that war is better than peace; we are not so stupid as that. But it is not peace when cruelty reigns, when stronger men steal from farmers and craftworkers, when the child can be enslaved or the old thrown out to starve, and no one lifts a hand. That is not peace: that is conquest, and evil.

Have you noticed that it is usually easier to judge than obey? Religious people are especially good at it. I tried

Given his own amorality, he could quite easily have come to terms with her criminal tendencies, but he could never, being the snob that he was, ever have overlooked her roots.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic—you were made to feel guilty about everything.

It seemed the older he grew - and he had grown old - the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.

And I thought how when William came into money from his grandfather who had profited from the war, and Catherine was still alive at that time, she had said very little about it. But she did say to me, lying on the tangerine couch, not long after this had happened, "It's dirty money. He should give it all away." But William did not give it all away; he became very rich.

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.