Quotes About Morality

lo correcto siempre funciona y siempre triunfa.

La palabra «Nosotros» es como cal derramada sobre los hombres, que los solidifica y endurece hasta hacerlos de piedra, y que aplasta todo bajo ella, y aquello que es blanco y aquello que es negro se pierden igualmente en su gris. Es la palabra mediante la cual los depravados roban la virtud de los buenos, mediante la cual los débiles roban el vigor de los fuertes, mediante la cual los necios roban la sabiduría de los sabios.

there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

A "compromise" does not consist of doing something one dislikes, but of doing something one knows to be evil.

There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it—it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it—you don't know what right is and you're not a man.

You who won't allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal," the unforgotten voice was saying to him, "what have you allowed into your moral code?

Un ser de conciencia volitiva no puede seguir una conducta automática. Necesita un código de valores para guiar sus acciones. El valor hay que ganarlo y conservarlo; la virtud es la acción por la que se gana y se conserva aquél. El valor presupone una respuesta a la pregunta: ¿Valor para quién y para qué? El valor presupone una norma, un propósito y la necesidad de actuar frente a una alternativa. Donde no hay alternativas no son posibles los valores.

Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit. Such are the reasons why—when one is asked: "Surely you don't think in terms of black-and-white, do you?"—the proper answer (in essence, if not in form) should be: "You're damn right I do!

The theoretical purpose of that grotesque absurdity is to establish a moral inversion: to make the initiation of force moral, and resistance to force immoral—and thus to obliterate the right of self-defense. The immediate practical purpose is to foster the activities of the lowest political breed: the provocateurs, who commit acts of force and place the blame on their victims.

Una moralidad que se atreva a deciros que obtendréis la felicidad en la renunciación a vuestra dicha, que valoréis aquélla por el fracaso de vuestros valores, es una insolente negación de la moralidad.

the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence

Morality is a very real and extremely potent human postulate projected onto the world. It includes broadly shared common denominators, evolutionarily engraved in human nature by the logic and adaptive pressures of social life and social cooperation. It consists of a bundle of attitudes and precepts that serve this logic, which takes different and sometimes incommensurable forms between people and between different cultural traditions.

Rather than being discovered or revealed, morality is a historically developing human creation in the service of social needs.

Furthermore, loyalty to the point of self-sacrifice to one's kin-culture group in a life-and-death conflict with other groups was part and parcel of morality in ancestral human societies, for obvious reasons, and it is still widely regarded as a virtue. For this reason, authorized killing for one's country in war is starkly distinguished morally from unathorized killing, known as murder.

You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ

Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.

Could one really concentrate on one's job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?

She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that?

We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality.

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil . . .

wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home.