Quotes About Morality

You don't need the technical understanding to make the moral judgments.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days' examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month's time.

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

We were not made for this killing thing, I swear. Back up. Big mistake.

One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won't even question the system. If it makes a profit, that's the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.

Ugly as homemade sin.

Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes.

Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we're all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.

Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let's us be better than those guys so we can hate on them.

Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow.

He stamped me with a belief in justice, then drenched me in culpability, and I wouldn't wish such torment even on a mosquito.

It is possible to establish zero tolerance for murder as a solution to anything

If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn't technically hold it against me.

Truth is objective. A man should be respected for telling it, not threatened.

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

I am losing faith in such a simple thing as despising an enemy with unequivocal righteousness.