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Quotes About Moral

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.
~ Sam Harris
The point, of course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning—norms which, when made explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties.
~ Sam Harris
It has always been the practice of mankind to judge of actions by the event. The same attempts, conducted in the same manner, but terminated by different success, produce different judgments: they who attain their wishes never want celebrators of their wisdom and their virtue; and they that miscarry are quickly discovered to have been defective not only in mental but in moral qualities. [...] he that fails in his endeavours after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
~ Samuel Johnson
Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated.
~ Samuel Richardson
My Mother was an excellent woman: She had instilled into my earliest youth, almost from infancy, notions of moral rectitude, and the first principles of Christianity; now rather ridiculed than inculcated in our youth of condition.
~ Samuel Richardson
So, the moral of that story, other than never underestimate an independent bookseller, was that the Continental Army and its commander in chief had a soft spot for Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox.
~ Sarah Vowell
and thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man's follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot . . . when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain, valid and livable.
~ Sarah Vowell
Discontent with the actual is the necessary precondition of every moral change and spiritual rebirth.
~ Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
He turned out to be right. Grielescu had attached himself to the Nazis, not to the milder, Italian form of fascism.
~ Saul Bellow
Y is convinced that Israel has sinned too much, that it has become too corrupt, and that it has lost its moral capital and has nothing to fight with.
~ Saul Bellow
Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot.
~ Scott Anderson
Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know
~ Scott Anderson
normative ethics refers to the discipline that produces moral norms or rules as its end product.
~ Scott B. Rae
metaethics is an area of ethics that investigates the meaning of moral language, or the epistemology of ethics, and also considers the justification of ethical theories and judgments.
~ Scott B. Rae
Human nature," I continued, "has its limits. It is able to endure a certain degree of joy, sorrow, and pain, but becomes annihilated as soon as this measure is exceeded. The question, therefore, is, not whether a man is strong or weak, but whether he is able to endure the measure of his sufferings. The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is the authority of position and the authority of knowledge - 'Authority flows from the one who knows.' But sharing in hardship confers upon a leader something quite rare - moral authority.
~ John Adair
Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.
~ John Adams
What is a minority The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy today that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have stood in the van of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.
~ John B. Gough
The moral law was not written for men alone in their individual character, but it was written as well for nations, and for nations great as this of which we are citizens. If nations reject and deride that moral law, there is a penalty which will inevitably follow. It may not come at once, it may not come in our lifetime; but, rely upon it, the great Italian is not a poet only, but a prophet, when he says: "The sword of heaven is not in haste to smite, Nor yet doth linger."
~ John Bright
I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things profane; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial.
~ John Bunyan
Who are we to make such a decision? To allow another living being - any living being - to die, when ours is the power to prevent it? - Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic)
~ John Byrne
As a youth, I was too sunny and filled with the milk of human kindness to be able to comprehend such a bitter moral to the story. I just thought it meant Dalton did not need the approval of his peers, that he was a nonconformist (as was I, and all of my generation. We were nonconformists together, in perfect lockstep, each careful to be a nonconformist exactly like all the others). Like I said, I did not get it.
~ John C Wright
No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice.
~ John C. Wright
The moral bottom had dropped out of my world without changing a mote of sunlight.
~ John Cheever