Quotes About Moral

When we are unwilling to draw clear moral lines between free societies and fear societies, when we are unwilling to call the former good and the latter evil, we will not be able to advance the cause of peace because peace cannot be disconnected from freedom.

Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.

A lack of moral clarity is why an Israeli journalist compared a kipa to a prison. It is why people in free societies cannot distinguish between religious fundamentalists in democratic states and religious terrorists in fundamentalist states. It is why people in free societies can come to see their fellow citizens as their enemies and foreign dictators as their friends.

As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.

and there are tons of people I hate so much that I wouldn't mind taking them out. But killing them wouldn't get me anywhere - that's the conclusion I always come to. If I'm going to pay for it in the end, I might as well let them live.

We were never promised precision in this life... With the gift of agency to mankind, life cannot possibly present a perfectly tidy picture. The ambiguities of circumstances are partly, if not largely, the cumulative result of our varied use of our moral agency, but also of the structure of life itself.

Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.

The paradox of honor killings is that societies with the most rigid moral codes end up sanctioning behavior that is supremely immoral: murder.

Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that "poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.

Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The Left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the 'root cause' of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.

Like all hopelessly self-absorbed rock stars he detoured away from moral considerations and believed what he and his fans wanted.

Hell has no interest in our debauched moral currency.

There is nothing more common than to transform a duty that inconveniences us into an "ethical dilemma".

If you do something just because of how you feel that is not a good action at all.

Jamais la pitié ne s'empare aussi fortement de nous qu'au spectacle de la beauté atteinte par le souffle délétère de la débauche.

competition between companies is at least in part a competition between different moral ideas.

If pain is too bad to be executed by everybody, and seen by everybody, is it not because it is too bad?

Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world.

Because we could change, we did not always know what was natural in us and what was acquired from our culture. Because we could change, we could be overly shaped by culture and society, to a point where we drifted too far from our true nature and became alienated from ourselves. While we may rejoice at the thought that the brain and human nature may be "improved," the idea of human perfectibility or plasticity stirs up a hornet's nest of moral problems.

The abashed modesty that faddish cultural relativism seeks to impose on us is not merely unwarranted on intellectual grounds. It is a species of grave moral delinquency. Our doctors not only "know different" about how the body works, and how its illnesses and injuries may be treated, they "know better." To deny this is to open the door to all kinds of avoidable suffering, in this society and elsewhere.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon

Hermann Hesse a raison de dire que les textes de Kafka ne sont ni religieux, ni métaphysiques, ni moraux , mais simplement poétiques. (p. 250)

That generation was inoculated against any attempt in its own country by its own leaders to foment a war by shouting rhetorical slogans or waving moral flags. But it was left defenseless against an aggressor ready to force war upon us.