Quotes About Morality

Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.

Sie töten so gerne Tiere, weil es unter Strafe steht, Menschen umzubringen, und weil sie doch so gerne auslöschen, am liebsten sich. Wie die Augen blind werden, im Augenblick des Übergangs von einem beseelten Lebewesen zu einem Fleisch. Seele. Das Wort für den Herzschlag.

This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality Whatever it encounters in this temporal life Depends upon one's actions.

TRUTH can never be RUTHless

Two wrongs may not make a right, but they can surely mislead a right.

Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values.

Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes

I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

Greed and cruelty are pretty widely distributed throughout humanity, as are their victims.

I wanted to make sure that the man who found the genie would not take terrible advantage of her, so he needed to be a person of integrity and honor - which is why I made the male lead an astronaut. The rest, as they say, is history.

Love is not an honorable sentiment

I spend some of my time brooding about people who seem addicted to double standards - those who take an allegedly principled stand on a Monday, then switch firmly to the opposite principle on Tuesday if it is to their advantage.

I believe that the war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest…. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

Let no one ever from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals.

Conscience is the internal perception of the reaction of a particular wish operating within us

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

But I didn't realize then that the consequence of sin is that you have to trample on other people.

It's a good thing when you don't dare do something if you don't think it's right. But it's not good when you think something's not right because you don't dare do it.

I've done many things that I thought I would never dare to do because they were sins. But I didn't realize then that the consequence of sin is that you have to trample on other people.

Virtue herself is her own fairest reward.

Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.

There is a natural right that says that when the state asks you for a third of what you earned through back-breaking work, this seems to you a reasonable demand and you give in. If the state asks you for more, or much more, then it is a clear abuse against you and then you try to find evasive ways to make you feel coherent to your intimate sense of morality and it doesn't make you feel ethically guilty.