Quotes About Morality

We squatted over the hole and waited. The ant struggled in the soft, sandy trap until a pair of pincers suddenly reached up and grabbed it, thrashed up a little dust, and pulled it under. Gone, just like that. "Don't do any more of them, Leah," Ruth May said. "The ant wasn't bad." I felt embarrassed, being told insect morals by my baby sister. Usually cruelty inspired Ruth May no end, and I was just desperate to help her get her spirits back.

Can one who hates right govern?" Job 34:13

It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

I thought and thought. "I would like to hear a story about a little girl who doesn't get invited to a meanie boy's birthday. And so she sneaks to his house. And she lets a wild pony out of the barn. And then it stomples the boy into a flattie pancake. And all the children

chastised when they have misbehaved, and taught the difference between right and wrong. Now, where is my dressing gown?

Barry Eisler

I read Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, where Niebuhr talked about how the baser self has to deceive the better self to get the better self's buy-in for behavior it would never otherwise agree to.

Barry Eisler

When I'd killed Ozawa at the sent?, I'd briefly wondered whether I was now one of the bad guys. By the time I did McGraw, I'd figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise r?nin, I decided, than a naïve samurai.

there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters

Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler

My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To what I did there. Either there was no God, or there was and he didn't give a damn.

People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there's just what you can do, and what you can't. Well, I could. And I was going to.

But she was also uneasy. She remembered when she'd been in college and had come across the Nietzsche quote: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.

She had shared his sheets, and, in nightmares of remorse, he had shared her body, waking with drastic regret, feeling as soiled and soilsome as the city itself.

Men of character continued to sail to their death for men of greed.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but in oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

The horrors—ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution—once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference. We denounce those who order it, we condemn the people who carry out the policies, calling them inhumane. But the behavior is fully human. We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy. And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and this display our character.

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good...

Justice is a mighty fine thing.

Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen. But it generally was not a part of religious activities.

if the ends are sufficiently important to require lies instead of the truth.