quotations about morality
Ethics and I had crossed paths recently, and I'm not sure that I fell on the right side of the morality line.
S. C. STEPHENS
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Effortless
My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.
MICHAEL SHERMER
The Science of Good and Evil
Every man also has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", The Waste Books
Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality -- which answers only to my heart -- is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.
BRANDON SANDERSON
The Way of Kings
The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Descent of Man
Moral progress is a process of isolation; the mountain tops are lonely.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
BIBLE
Isaiah 5:20
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on signs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.
JOEL STEIN
Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2006
"Immoral" is the judgment of the stalled ox on the gamboling lamb.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Moral argument tries to appeal to a capacity for impartial motivation which is supposed to be present in all of us. Unfortunately it may be deeply buried, and in some cases it may not be present at all. In any case it has to compete with powerful selfish motives, and other personal motives that may not be so selfish, in its bid for control of our behavior. The difficulty of justifying morality is not that there is only one human motive, but that there are so many.
THOMAS NAGEL
What Does It All Mean?
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
Morality is but the vestibule of religion.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
A man that puts himself on the ground of moral principle, if the whole world be against him, is mightier than all of them.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
Morality is a bit like the laws of nature in that it exists outside me and I am subject to it. (Of course, it isn't always the case that I follow it, but that is another matter.) Or in a stronger way, morality is a bit like the laws of mathematics, because morality seems to be about the world, not of it.
MICHAEL RUSE
Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know?
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre