Quotes About Moral

Practical wisdom, Aristotle told us, is the combination of moral will and moral skill.

Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage.

Exceptionalism"—the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations—was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics.

I will not resign. I will not do it. I am ready to resist by all means, even at the cost of my own life. . . . Foreign capital—imperialism united with reaction—created the climate for the army to break with their tradition. . . . Long live Chile! Long live the people! These are my last words. I am sure that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am sure it will be at least a moral lesson, and a rebuke to crime, cowardice and treason.

Personality and Character Ethics

In the words of Madame de Staël, "The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it: but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

There can be no moral authority to tell you what to do, for no such authority can lie outside your own will.

It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.

When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.

There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack "sin tax" is a strong economic incentive

glaring anomalies, personal opinions, emotional outbursts, or moral leanings.

Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?

Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators.

One of the most impressive civilizing offensives of the 1990s came from African American communities, who set themselves the task of recivilizing their young men. As with the pacifying of the American West a century before, much of the moral energy came from women and the church.

Religions have provided comfort, community, and moral guidance to countless people, and some biologists argue that a sophisticated deism, toward which many religions are evolving, can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of the mind and human nature.

Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.

By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution.

The human moral sense can also work at cross-purposes to our well-being.26 People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty. For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat.

Though truth-telling sheds no blood, it requires a painful emotional sacrifice on the part of the confessors in the form of shame, guilt, and a unilateral disarmament of their chief moral weapon, the claim to innocence.

The biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said that there are two reasons why humans do not turn into angels: moral imperfection and a body plan that cannot accommodate both arms and wings.

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.28

Our current moral understanding does not seek to balance the interests of a woman not to be raped, the interests of the men who may wish to rape her, and the interests of the husband and fathers who want to monopolize her sexuality. In an upending of the traditional valuation, the woman's ownership of her body counts for everything, and the interests of all other claimants count for nothing.

To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.