Quotes About Morality

To know what is right and choose to ignore it is the act of a coward.

Parler de paix tout en répandant le sang, c'est quelque chose que seul l'être humain peut faire.

Personne n'a le droit de nous juger avant la fin, parce que nous les hommes, on est capable du meilleur comme du pire

Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities. We have turned truth into a crime. We have robbed nature to within a

Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.

If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?

Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.

As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.

Religions always and everywhere insist upon the argument from authority. You should do this or that because the Pope or the Koran or the local priest says you should. For centuries most of the world convinced itself that the only reason people act morally is because of instruction, that in effect without superstition there can be no ethical behaviour.

What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interaction among people seeking to find ways to get along?

if commercial behaviour might make people more moral.

Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.

It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.

So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else's: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet

Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are random, in which case we are not responsible for them.

if your being is good your works will be good, and if your being is just your works will be just.

No man will say, There is no God 'till he is so hardened in sin that it has become his interest that there should be none to call him to account.

Men cannot expect to do ill and fare well, but to find that done to them which they did to others.

Let no man go beyond or defraud his brother, for, though it be hidden from man, it will be found that God is the avenger of all such.

Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. Freedom is the strength of character to do what is good, true, noble, and right.

When I ply the cutlass and make the equivalent of sixpence, idiot conscience applauds me. But if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds by writing, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. No, to come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush. To change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, that makes for a quiet conscience.

Philosophical theories can in this way become a destructive venture, confusing matters with false choices and sterile power schemes the cruel are only too happy to accept. In hostile hands, they become a pretext for doing nothing, for brushing off real and urgent moral duties in the care of animals.

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is a negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature ... It confronts us with the animal equivalent of Abraham Lincoln's condemnation of human slavery: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky.