Quotes About Moral

In English you label groups of people by their moral intentions and collective needs. A mob tries to convince itself it's right and needs to prove it. A crowd knows it's right because if it weren't right, they would all need to be someplace else. A throng doesn't give a fuck about moral imperatives, it just wants and needs something to happen.

Stories can elicit compassion on a case-by-case basis, but they can also lead us to question our moral principles and our habits of behavior. As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now').

This perverse moral mathematics is part of the reason why governments and individuals care more about a little girl stuck in a well than about events that will affect millions or billions. It is why outrage at the suffering of a few individuals can lead to actions, such as going to war, that have terrible consequences for many more.

empathy distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same way that prejudice does. Empathy is limited as well in that it focuses on specific individuals. Its spotlight nature renders it innumerate and myopic: It doesn't resonate properly to the effects of our actions on groups of people, and it is insensitive to statistical data and estimated costs and benefits

If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.

Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves-- autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?

The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.

The Christmas story is not intended to teach you a bunch of moral lessons that require no history to be helpful. It's a story that is rooted in real history, real acts of God that are intended to provide for you and me the one thing we desperately need: moral rescue. The Christmas story is about a God of glorious grace on the march, invading human history with the grace of redemption.

What you and I bring to our relationship with God is desperate spiritual and moral need.

But God has not called us to erect a little family monastery. Please read carefully what I am going to write next. Monastic parenting will not deliver your children from moral danger.

Each type of pseudo-populism comes into being to improve or save its respective adherents from the absence of a moral or social framework, which means that even if we don't understand them fully, we are expected to place our faith in them. Although these pseudo-populist organizations are relatively small, they manage to influence governments, invoke terror, and control large sums of capital.

Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.

Proselytizing is a moral imperative and feeds the marketplace of ideas. I want to hear everyone tell the truth as they see it. I want to learn from everyone.

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice; we

The highest moral purpose aimed at tn the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself;

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home

El día que asestes un arma en dirección a otro hombre será como si ya le hubieras matado.

We have, all of us, less control over our emotional states than we imagine, and not much more over our moral sensibilities.

Does my willingness to do my duty make the human race a bunch of dangerous killers?

Our religion, such as it is, has abandoned the only territory where it could not be challenged, the saving of souls, and has given up troubling our individual consciences. Instead, it has joined in the nationalization of the human conscience, so that a man's moral worth is now measured by the level of taxation he is willing to support, rather than by his faith or even his good works.

Love and hate; for only those who know how to hate know how to love. We keep this capacity; and as this alone serves to maintain and develop the moral sentiments in every animal society, so much the more will it be enough for the human race. We only ask one thing, to eliminate all that impedes the free development of these two feelings in the present society, all that perverts our judgment: --the State, the church, exploitation; judges, priests, governments, exploiters.

It must have been law that developed in man the sense of just and unjust, right and wrong. Our readers may judge of this explanation for themselves. They know that law has merely utilized the social feelings of man, to slip in, among the moral precepts he accepts, various mandates useful to an exploiting minority, to which his nature refuses obedience. Law has perverted the feeling of justice instead of developing it.

Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood?