Quotes About Morality

Generally, if you see Joe Ledger show up pointing a gun at you, I guess you start reexamining your conscience.

The line between immediate need and breaking the law is blurry at the best of times. And I'm not talking about the laws of states or nations. I'm talking about the laws of basic humanity.

It is universally better to obey God than Man when the laws of God and Man clash and interfere with one another.

Time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance.

Anyone—pope, propagandist, anti-Communist, anti-racist—who wants to silence criticism or regulate an argument in order to keep wrong-thinking people out of power has no moral claim to be anything but ignored.

They may disagree on a lot of things, but they regard lying and making stuff up as a firing offense.

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.

Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: Not in My Name.

One of the more surprising things about lashon hara, evil speech, in Judaism, is that it refers to speech that is true. False speech, libel, or slander, are something else and fall under a different prohibition.

There are indeed moral universals — the Hebrew Bible calls them 'the covenant with Noah' and they form the basis of modern codes of human rights. But they exist to create space for cultural and religious difference…

To the Judaic mind this is paganism, and it is never morally neutral. God creates order; man creates chaos—and the result is inevitably destructive.

One of the most profound contributions Torah made to the civilisation of the West is this: that the destiny of nations lies not in the externalities of wealth or power, fate or circumstance, but in moral responsibility: the responsibility for creating and sustaining a society that honours the image of God within each of its citizens, rich and poor, powerful or powerless alike.

A creed that tells us that we are no more than selfish genes, with nothing in principle to separate us from the animals, in a society whose strongest motivators are money and success, in a universe that came into existence for no reason whatsoever and for no reason will one day cease to be, will never speak as strongly to the human spirit as one that tells us we are in the image and likeness of God in a universe he created in love.

Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said.

A free society is a moral achievement. That is the central insight of the Torah. It depends on the existence of a shared moral code, a code we are taught by our parents, a code we internalise in the course of growing up, a code for whose maintenance we are collectively responsible. Today, throughout much of the West, morality has been largely outsourced to governments and regulatory bodies. The

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

What all four stories tell us is that there comes a time for each of us when we must make an ultimate decision as to who we are. It is a moment of existential truth. Lot is a Hebrew, not a citizen of Sodom. Eliezer is Abraham's servant, not his heir. Joseph is Jacob's son, not an Egyptian of loose morals. Moses is a prophet, not a priest. To say yes to who we are, we have to have the courage to say no to who we are not. Pain

The alternative to morality is violence. Violence is the attempt to satisfy my desires at the cost of yours.

Physically, the taller you are the more you look down on others. Morally, the reverse is the case. The more we look up to others, the higher we stand. For us, as for God, greatness is humility.

the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to "one very simple principle," in John Stuart Mill's phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself.

Cruelty to animals is wrong, not because animals have rights but because we have duties. The duty not to be cruel is intended to promote virtue, and the primary context of virtue is the relationship between human beings. But virtues are indivisible.

When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.

Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: "It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public."[4] This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought: