Quotes About Moral

The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace...but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.

Power doesn't corrupt. It's neutral. Someone always wants to corrupt power. It's the way a shotgun is not a deadly weapon until someone chooses to use it irrationally.

The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion.

Moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force.

As a nuclear power - as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has a moral responsibility to act.

More apparent to Teamster members than any moral lapses were the tangible gains that had been steadily realized under Hoffa since his advent to power.

If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership.

Christian philosophy has, like the Hebrew, uniformly attributed moral and physical evil to the action of created free will. Man has himself brought about the evil from which he suffers by transgressing the law of God, on obedience to which his happiness depended. . . . The errors of mankind, mistaking the true conditions of its own well-being, have been the cause of moral and physical evil.28

Thousands of pulpit orators have swayed their audiences as a wind sways standing corn; but in the result, those who were most affected differed nothing from their former selves. An effect of eloquence is sufficient to account for a vast amount of feeling at the moment; but to trace to this a moral power, by which a man, for his life long, overcomes his besetting sins, and adorns his name with Christian virtues, is to make sport of human nature.

Law is the embodiment of the moral sentiment of the people.

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the Slavery of that half of the Human Race who hate what you call Moral Virtue

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

Some consider this a paralyzing moral dilemma. I don't. For me, having lived through episodes of major depression, this is a no-brainer. If there is a pill that will make you well, or make it less likely you will get sick, you take it. If Prozac hasn't saved my life, it has profoundly changed it.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

First, they provide a compelling example of what it means to pursue quality as a guiding principle in business, investing, and life—a moral and intellectual commitment inspired by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

In further institutionalizing the great power of the majority, we are making the individual come to distrust himself. We are giving him a rationalization for the unconscious urging to find an authority that would resolve the burdens of free choice. We are tempting him to reinterpret the group pressures as a release, authority as freedom, and that this quest assumes a moral guise makes it only the more poignant.

I do not think... that any man has the right to take life. When he thinks he has he is at his most dangerous.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.