quotations about morality
It is the dutiful disposition of each person to spread morality outside of himself to the best of his ability and knowledge, i.e., to see to it that everyone has the same disposition he has ... It follows from this that the overall end of the moral community as a whole is to produce unanimity concerning matters of morality.
JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE
The System of Ethics: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre
Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.
ROBERT BOLT
A Man For All Seasons
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
There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
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
Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
The system of morality which Socrates made it the business of his life to teach was raised upon the firm basis of religion. The first principles of virtuous conduct which are common to all mankind are, according to this excellent moralist, laws of God; and the conclusive argument by which he supports this opinion is, that no man departs from these principles with impunity.
WILLIAM ENFIELD
The History of Philosophy
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
Almost every Englishman imagines he is moral because he objects to immorality--in others.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
What counts as morality is visible; it is seen by others, and it is they who judge whether or not one's act is moral. In this visible and public world, being is equated with acting ... and it is this surface world of appearances that counts in the world of sociality. Being godly, conversely, is equated with feeling. To be godly is to have one's heart full of God, a notion reminiscent of the Orthodox concept of theosis, at which point the world of appearances, the world of acts, is no longer central. Godly morality, then, cannot be judged by others because it is not visible; it does not depend upon the public. Only God, and perhaps the one who is godly, can know what is in the heart.
JARRETT ZIGON
"Aleksandra Vladimirovna: Moral Narratives of a Russian Orthodox Woman", Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies
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
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Victims of Morality", Mother Earth, March 1913
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Across the Plains
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
Neither the home, nor the churches, nor the communities have stopped teaching morality for a moment. What has happened during the last half century or so is that some of this teaching has become confused, contradictory, uncertain. Also, its contents have become very different from what an unexamined popular voice still calls the moral virtues. One result is that children nowadays are exposed to a teaching of widely divergent values, compared to a still recent era when those taught by home, church, community, and school were one and the same.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Moral Education: Five Lectures
There is nothing ... quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It's easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
GEORGES BATAILLE
attributed, "The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille", On Bataille
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
Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.
VOLTAIRE
attributed, Day's Collacon