Quotes About Morality

Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another?

I would not score very highly on religious value.

Framing the truth at the deepest moral level matters.

The entire Strict Father model is based on the further assumption that the exercise of authority is itself moral; that is, it is moral to reward obedience and punish disobedience. I will refer to this most basic assumption as the Morality of Reward and Punishment. Reward

Empathy is the basis of a major conception of morality. • Morality Is Empathy. The logic of empathy is this: If you really feel what another person feels, and if you want to feel a sense of well-being, then you will want that person to experience a sense of well-being.

In debates over the death penalty, liberals rank Absolute Goodness over Retribution, and conservatives tend to prefer Retribution: a life for a life. Suppose

Therefore, any social or political system in which people get things they don't earn, or are rewarded for lack of self-discipline or for immoral behavior, is simply an immoral system.

An interesting advantage of restitution is that it does not place you in a moral dilemma with respect to the positive-action and debt-payment principles. You both perform a positive action and you pay your debt. A

Two wrongs do not make a right; but three rights make a left.

Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.

What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.

To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.

Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality.

It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.

Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.

No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they beautiful.

He had come to think that so long as a man wants to do right he may go where he can: when he can go no further, then it is not the way.

Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business, namely, his own character and conduct.

The man who grounds his action on another's cowardice, is essentially a coward himself.

he would perhaps have known that to try too hard to make people good, is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good is to be good -- remembering well the beam and the mote; that the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.

Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm.

Even in the matter of stealing we must think of our own beam before our neighbour's mote. It is not easy to be honest. There is many a thief who is less of a thief than many a respectable member of society.

There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind.

To say a man might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness.