Quotes About Morality

especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since

Dunque alla fine mi svelo: sono un mascalzone, per aver creato alla leggera, e un malvagio, per aver distrutto senza pietà. Non ho scusanti.

But after all, I'm not God's lawyer. I'm not doing any backbiting, God forbid, and I can't stand the evil tongue.

I only wanted to be good—the trouble is that being good gets you nowhere.

We're flimflam artists. But remember, sonny, you can't con people unless they're greedy to begin with. W. C. Fields had it right. You can't cheat an honest man.

It's indecent for anyone to be this happy, Tracy Whitney thought.

But remember, sonny, you can't con people unless they're greedy to begin with. W. C. Fields had it right. You can't cheat an honest man.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.

We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.

Who lacks sex speaks about sex, hungry talks about food, a person who has no money - about money, and our oligarchs and bankers talk about morality

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.

In this situation, what we call natural ethics has nothing to offer but the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think one is better than others. This is where ethics based on religion enters the scene with its promises of a better life hereafter. I am inclined to think that, for as long as virtue goes unrewarded here below, ethics will preach in vain.

It has long been our contention that ' dread of society [soziale Angsty is the essence of what is called conscience.

It has long been our contention that ' dread of society [soziale Angst] is the essence of what is called conscience.

All who seek to be nobler than their constitution permits succumb to neurosis; they would have been better in health if they had found it possible to be morally worse.

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs.    If

La consciencia de la culpabilidad y el sentimiento del deber serían las dos propiedades características del animal gregario.

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.

But even so, one can just as well hold God responsible for the existence of the devil as for the evil he personifies.

To love one's neighbour as oneself — a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs as strongly counter to the original nature of man.

Jeg tror at den hellighet vi tilkjennegir de ti bud, sløver vår sans for erkjennelse av virkeligheten.