Quotes About Morality

It is wicked to tell a person a lie about God because, if we come to believe the wrong things about God, we will think the wrong things about ourselves, and we will live meanly or badly.

All moral relationships are indissoluble according to their concept, as one can easily convince one's self by postulating their truth. A true state, a true marriage, a true friendship, and indissoluble. But no state, no marriage, no friendship corresponds completely to its concept... (Karl Marx)

For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks. If dey's one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman cars listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact.

We use this comparison, even if improperly, because dogs, hyenas, or other fierce beasts never do the evil things that men do.)

Las putas nunca debieron irse de aquella casa. El primero y el segundo oficio más viejos del mundo deberían estar juntos. Al fin y al cabo, entre el nacimiento de uno y otro sólo mediaron unas horas. El primero surgió para que cualquiera pudiera satisfacer las exigencias del amor; el segundo, para que nadie intentara satisfacer por su cuenta las exigencias del odio».

A Union soldier serving in the South said of the freedman, "Human or not, there he is in our midst, millions strong; and if he is not educated mentally and morally, he will make us trouble." That, in short, is the theory on which our public school system is based. By 1880 it had already developed its fundamental characteristics—it was, and is, as Michael Katz writes, "universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased.

Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity

Courts send black teenagers to jail for possession of marijuana, while white college kids are sentenced to community service for driving while intoxicated, a considerably more deadly offense. And Evangelicals editorialize about the sexual abominations of consenting adults, while very little is said about the plague of date rapes in college towns.

I would prefer as friend a good man ignorant than one more clever who is evil too.

In goodness there are all kinds of wisdom.

There is no benefit in the gifts of a bad man.

The day for honest men, the night for thieves.

When good men die their goodness does not perish,But lives though they are gone. As for the bad,All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.

Often a noble face hides filthy ways.

Silver and gold are not the only coin virtue too passes current all over the world.

The gifts of a bad man bring no good with them.

Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all only our characters are steadfast, not our gold.

Of all evils, indeed, famine is the worst, and it destroys nothing so effectively as shame. For that which under other circumstances is worthy of respect, in the midst of famine is despised. Thus women snatched the food from the very mouths of their husbands and children, from their fathers, and what was most pitiable of all, mothers from their babes. And while their dearest ones were wasting away in their arms, they were not ashamed to take away from them the last drops that supported life.

Reading is not a project of moral improvement, but by broadening our perspective, it can make us less susceptible to the immediate seductions offered by our environment; and in the best-case scenarios, it can enlarge the scope of humane understanding, and of empathy.

One can always bear what is right.

Kidnapping children is not a good idea. All the same, sometimes it has to be done.

The braver a man is - and Krok had been very brave - the less he will bully little creatures who cannot defend themselves.

Muriel sprinkled salt over her haddock mousse. 'It is not easy to be specific, but both morally and hygienically there is . . . a kind of laxness which I had not expected.' Dr Lightbody leant forward. The discussion of hygienic and moral laxness with a beautiful woman in a softly shaded restaurant was exactly to his taste.

The intertwining of love and romance with hedonist and antimodernist themes marked the shift from Victorian morality to a consumption-oriented or 'hedonistic' one in which pleasure was encouraged actively rather than dealt with ambivalently.