Quotes About Values

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

If you never encounter anything in your community that offends you, then you are not living in a free society.

Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.

We have ripped the humanity out of our companies. It's threatening the very underpinnings of our society.

Anybody who tries to change society without examining the family is trying to push a shadow without moving a statue.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

There are two crucial values without which human life is simply inconceivable. One is security, a measure of security, feeling safe. The other is freedom, ability to self-assert, to do what you really would like to do and so on. They are both necessary. Security without freedom is slavery. Freedom without security is complete chaos where you are lost, abandoned, you don't know what to do.

the innate tendency of a society of consumers to instil in their members a willingness to accord other people the same - and no more - respect as they are trained to feel and to show to consumer goods, the objects designed and destined for instantaneous, and possibly untroubled satisfaction, with no strings attached.

Politicians who call for the resuscitation of dying or terminally ill 'family values', and serious about what their calls imply, should begin by thinking hard about the consumerist roots of the simultaneous wilting of social solidarity inside workplaces and fading of the caring–sharing impulse inside family homes.

These values are 'distinctly European' because they were thought out, articulated and refined in the part of the planet that tends to be described as 'Europe proper', and their articulation and refinement cannot be separated from the course of Europe's history.

Justice' primes the human habitat for peaceful and friendly togetherness. It sets the table - the round table - for polylogue and negotiations guided by the will of agreement. Justice is the most 'socializing' of values.

It is because the moral economy has little need of the market that market forces are up in arms against it.

Cuanto mejor protegidos de la contaminación están los valores preservados en el pensamiento, menos relevancia tienen para la vida de aquellos a quienes deberían ser de utilizada.

A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.

Being a good person is more than just not being a bad person.

But what is unjust? That depends on a person's thoughts, values, and beliefs. People differ sharply on what is just or unjust in this world. Thus, some people become angry much quicker than others.

Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to the validity of the ultimate ideals and values that fluctuates rather than the ultimate ideals and values?

The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use.

Right living is a way to right thinking.

Yet our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but rather how to remain human in the skyscrapers. NOTES 1 Portions of this section are based on Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951).

I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry

Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.