Quotes About Morality

PREFER DEATH TO a lying word, for the ripple-effect of its plunder is worse. When a man dies, he dies alone— but many are slain with the lie and its curse. —AVRAHAM IBN HASDAI (C. 915–990)

The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.

It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it.

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?

in so many areas of life, Nature had made it agreeable for man to do what was virtuous.

I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.

When we choose things that are evil and stupid, then we pay the cost of lost opportunities to do something good—something wise and unselfish.

He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself doesn't become a monster.

Crime doesn't pay," I said to Sirius, "unless you're a lawyer.

The world was amoral. To be idealistic was to ask to be blindsided,

she did everything as if God were watching her: never threw bread on the fire (which was feeding the devil)

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the facade of his appearance.

We are so accustomed to classifying judgments, arguments and deeds in terms of morality that we forget how relatively new the notion was in the culture of the Enlightenment.

She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

We know that there are no self-evident truths.

The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.

It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.

I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example.

Indeed, one of the functions of the structures of normality is that by making it unnecessary for almost everybody almost all the time to provide justifications for what they are doing or are about to do, they relieve us of what would otherwise be an intolerable burden.

Central to these was and is the claim that it is only possible to understand the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity adequately from a standpoint external to that culture.

Ronald Dworkin has recently argued that the central doctrine of modern liberalism is the thesis that questions about the good life for man or the ends of human life are to be regarded from the public standpoint as systematically unsettlable. On these individuals are free to agree or to disagree. The rules of morality and law hence are not to be derived from or justified in terms of some more fundamental conception of the good for man.