quotations about morality
Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist bestiality is moral, and nothing else.
LEON TROTSKY
Their Morals and Ours
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
The standard of morals is as variable as morals themselves; of which every nation has a different code, and every custom a different reading.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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?
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
KARL KRAUS
Morality and Criminal Justice
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.
LORD ACTON
The Study of History
I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true.... If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.
LISA RANDALL
Discover Magazine, July 2006
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?
C. G. JUNG
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Morality hides and covers, but never mortifies, nor cures the Corruptions of Nature; and mortified they must be, or you cannot be saved.
JOHN FLAVEL
The Whole Works of the Reverend Mr. John Flavel
Morality is necessary for our flourishing as humans, not because it is a disguised form of egoism, but because to flourish as humans is to live well together in communities.
DAVID FISHER
Morality and War: Can War Be Just in the Twenty-first Century?
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
H. L. MENCKEN
A Mencken Chrestomathy
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Sceptical Essays
We should never doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step toward totalitarianism.
KENNETH MINOGUE
The Servile Mind, How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line.
FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects