Quotes About Morality

Perhaps, beguiled by custom and order, one's sense of evil goes numb.

The jury had persuaded themselves that he was decent, because they had wanted to think that in his shoes they would have been decent too. They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.

Don't you think that queer? That a common coarse-featured woman might drink morphia and be sent to gaol for it, while I am saved and sent to visit her—and all because I am a lady?

We are not here to help them, ma'am. We are here to punish them. There are too many good women who are poor or ill or hungry, for us to bother with the bad ones.

The end of education is character

one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's distance from the scene of conflict.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

Mendoza said to Tanner, "I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich." Tanner replied, "I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands." The

The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, pointed out the variations in ethical definitions by virtue of where you stand. Mendoza said to Tanner, "I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich." Tanner replied, "I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands." The

The myth of altruism as a motivating factor in our behavior could arise and survive only in a society bundled in the sterile gauze of New England puritanism and Protestant morality and tied together with the ribbons of Madison Avenue public relations. It is one of the classic American fairy tales. From

in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.

Aquinas wondered what would happen if God wanted to achieve universal resurrection. In other words, bringing everybody who had ever lived back to life at the same time. What would happen to cannibals, and the people they ate? You couldn't bring them all back at the same time, because the cannibals are made of the people they have eaten. You could have one but not the other. Ha.' I looked at Rowan. 'That's a good example of a paradox.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

At the heart of the Ten Commandments is an Israelite's honesty about one's neighbor (Exod 20:16). At the heart of the Bible's ethic is telling the truth. Honesty mattered then and it matters now.

Torah is not theoretical morality but lived theology, a life enflamed by knowing God.

Purity is not the same as morality but is about who or what is fit for the temple, and so classifications are made.

Morality is about a heart that is right before God.

Many in our day climb under the moral shade of Matthew 7:1 to take the supposed high road in saying, "I'm not the judge." Those who take this supposed high road may be missing the whole point of Jesus' words: sin is sin, and one cannot follow Jesus and turn a blind eye to sin. What Jesus is calling us to here is not the absence of moral discernment.

It is one thing to be judgmental; it is entirely different to say greed is wrong or that sexual sins are wrong, and saying so is not judgmentalism.

There is nothing complex about this most simple of moral maxims; its difficulty is in the doing, not in the knowing.

we must learn to distinguish moral discernment from personal condemnation.2 This distinction—the ability to know what is good from what is bad and to be able to discern the difference versus the posture of condemning another person—enables us to see what Jesus prohibits in this passage.

Fourth lesson in Bible reading: we are challenged to be better than nonfollowers. Followers are marked by a greater righteousness or by more righteousness. (Just what that more will look like can be found in the antitheses of 5:21–48.)

We stand with Calvin when it comes to the moral compass: Jesus "means that however difficult, arduous, troublesome or painful God's rule may be, we must make no excuse for that, as the righteousness of God should be worth more to us, than all the other things which are chiefly dear and precious.

John does not adjudicate how to engage in politics. Instead, John instructs Christians how to discern the moral character of governments and politicians and policies and laws.