Quotes About Morality

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.

Men think religion bears the same relation to life that flowers do to trees. The tree must grow through a long period before the blossoming time; so they think religion is to be a blossom just before death, to secure heaven. But the Bible represents religion, not as the latest fruit of life, but as the whole of it--beginning, middle, and end. It is simply right living.

I would not make the world wise at the expense of a virtue.

Not if he wanted to be able to look at himself in the mirror in the morning without seeing the word asshole written across his forehead.

What happy and successful single people are threatening is not the institution of marriage but the cultural consensus on its special value. Same-sex marriage does not threaten the institution of marriage, either. The sticking point (or at least one of them) is that large numbers of Americans remain unconvinced that gay men and lesbians are the moral equivalent of straight people. To them, keeping marriage pure and sacred means keeping same-sex partners out.

God is a moral being, a being in whom justice, rectitude, goodness reign supreme. He has made man a moral being, and wound his nature up with the same moral weights that move is own divine life.

There's more to people than what you can see, isn't there, Aunt Lillian?" Immediately, Lillian pursued the subject. "What do you mean? He respects you, I hope." "Respect" in the aunts' vocabulary meant "no sex." "Yes, he respects me.

Ethically challenged magical practitioners," I said.

People don't like to speak ill of the dead even when they're monsters, let alone when they're loved ones. People like to forget any bad things that someone did and why should they remember?

If they were ugly, Peter, would you care half so much?" asked Nightingale. "There are some hideous things out there that can talk and reason, and I wonder if you would be quite so quick to rush to their defence." "Maybe not," I said. "But that just makes me shallow, it doesn't make me wrong.

young woman of negotiable affection

Do you really think that you're some sort of superior creature? Do you think that your ability to make money, to steal and lie and murder, places you above normal men?

You're mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund

I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good i know of everyone

Immorality may be fun, but it isn't fun enough to take the place of one hundred percent virtue and three square meals a day.

Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold,And almost every vice—almighty gold.

Good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times

only ever stole from those who had money to spare and remained adamant that crime need not involve thuggery: the Pinkertons found it astonishing that "throughout his career he never used a revolver or jeopardized the life of a victim.

There was a village saying, much repeated: "God said behave, but He didn't say how.

admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness

Lying is wrong, son, but if it serves a greater good, it's OK.

He was small, thin, greedy, clever, morally void, and monstrously bent. March "took corruption for granted,37 and used it casually and openly." He had been imprisoned for bribery and escaped to France, and by 1939 he was the richest, and dodgiest, man in Spain, nicknamed "the last pirate of the Mediterranean

Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness," wrote Maugham.

the end, the difference between them is a matter of moral judgment: Gordievsky was on the side of the good; and Ames was on his own side.