Quotes About Morality

Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as a free-standing substitute for it.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.

Be good and you will be lonesome.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing clean and green.

Moses' question - the tough one about God's allowing human moral evil - is reasonable only if we believe that a good God causes, or at any rate allows, everything that happens, and that it's all for the best.

I'm more interested in being good than being famous.

As for sin. I honestly can't believe God is so bored or so lecherous as to care how close my body and its various parts get to someone else's various parts.

Be strong enough to carry the burden of sin that goes with doing the right thing.

If the impulse to act correctly did not come from yourself, Confucius said to a follower, what good could it do for you? In his mind, the moral was beautiful, and it should not succumb to rules. Rules diminish its beauty and subtlety, and adherence to them is an admission of one's own moral failure.

Losing that demanding God didn't mean I lost my moral compass and my ethics. It simply meant my ethics and morality came from human sources as opposed to coming from a phantom figure and its magical book.

I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport - would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine.

It's very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.

The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality. It looked pretty damn good to me on the other side of the line.

I love the saying "Nobody likes a dirty old man or a clean little boy.

I believe the words "meat" and "treated with ammonia" should never occur in the same paragraph—much less the same sentence. Unless you're talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.

You see a lot of this ailment — perfectly reasonable, even shrewd businessmen, hitting their fifties, suddenly writing checks with their cock. And they are not entirely misguided in this; they probably will get laid. The restaurant business does have somewhat relaxed mores about casual sex, and there are a number of amiably round-heeled waitresses, most of them hopelessly untalented aspiring actresses for whom sexual congress with older, less attractive guys is not entirely unfamiliar.