Morality Quotes

1. "I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever."
Author: Aldous Huxley

2. "Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

3. "The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised."
Author: Andrew Carnegie

4. "The world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life."
Author: Ayn Rand

5. "What is morality, she asked.Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price."
Author: Ayn Rand

6. "We are on strike against martyrdom—and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them."
Author: Baron D'Holbach

8. "Food comes first and then moralityBertolt brecht"
Author: Bertolt Brecht

9. "But the imposition of morality onto science, - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years."
Author: Bill Condon

10. "Morality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn't cheapen it with words"
Author: C.P. Snow

11. "You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?""It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize.""Must be a human thing.""Exactly."
Author: Christopher Moore

12. "What we now call "morality" was evolved – as nearly all social and physical human attributes were – to aid us in survival and, ultimately, reproduction. This morality requires only that we be guided by our developed conscience (or "moral sense") – and not a God or gods."
Author: David G. McAfee

13. "Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality."
Author: Edmund Burke

14. "As a parent and a citizen, I'll take a Bill Gates (or Warren Buffett) over Steve Jobs every time. If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs's example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie."
Author: Eric Alterman

15. "Some Christians say god is the source of morality, these people have clearly never read the bible."
Author: Gabriel Neil

16. "These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.—Literature and Evil"
Author: Georges Bataille

17. "The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

18. "I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium."
Author: Hari Kunzru

19. "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) - that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly."
Author: Howard Zinn

20. "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality"
Author: Ian McEwan

21. "The death of dogma is the birth of morality."
Author: Immanuel Kant

22. "Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality."
Author: Iris Murdoch

23. "We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want more community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it."
Author: James Davison Hunter

24. "Religion and morality are critical to how students think about politics and form opinions on political issues."
Author: Jeanne Shaheen

25. "For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

26. "Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion."
Author: Khushwant Singh

27. "Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality."
Author: Linus Pauling

28. "Nations are not poor or rich because of their wealth but exceptional morality."
Author: M.F. Moonzajer

29. "Morality is a contraband in war."
Author: Mahatma Gandhi

30. "Morality is the clipping of a bird's wings."
Author: Marty Rubin

31. "In ressentiment morality, love for the "small," the "poor," the "weak," and the "oppressed" is really disguised hatred, repressed envy, an impulse to detract, etc., directed against the opposite phenomena: "wealth," "strength," "power," "largesse." When hatred does not dare to come out into the open, it can be easily expressed in the form of ostensible love—love for something which has features that are the opposite of those of the hated object. This can happen in such a way that the hatred remains secret. When we hear that falsely pious, unctuous tone (it is the tone of a certain "socially-minded" type of priest), sermonizing that love for the "small" is our first duty, love for the "humble" inspirit, since God gives "grace" to them, then it is often only hatred posing as Christian love."
Author: Max Scheler

32. "Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?"
Author: Max Stirner

33. "Morality was viewed by the Egyptians not as the assertion of self against the world but rather as the individual search for harmony with the eternal order ... The Egyptian was free to seek out a place in a benevolent world order, but he was not to disrupt it by either nonconformity or self-abnegation."
Author: Norman F. Cantor

34. "Where commerce and capitalism are invloved, often times, morality and honor sink to the bottom-Oliver Goldsmith paraphrased"
Author: Oliver Goldsmith

35. "Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."
Author: Oscar Wilde

36. "If morality is always relative to one's own society, then you, coming from your society, have your moral standards and I, coming from my society, have mine. It follows that when I criticize your moral standards, I am simply expressing the morality of my society, but it also follows that when you condemn me for criticizing the moral standards of your society, you are simply expressing the morality of your society. There is, on this view, no way of moving outside the morality of one's own society and expressing a transcultural or objective moral judgment about anything, including respect for the cultures of different peoples. Hence if we happen to live in a culture that honors those who subdue other societies and suppress their cultures, then that is our morality, and the relativist can offer no cogent reason why we should not simply get on with it."
Author: Peter Singer

37. "All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions."
Author: Philip Pullman

38. "There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms."
Author: Robert Reich

39. "They don't subscribe to our sense of morality; they don't believe in an afterlife; they don't believe in a God or religion. And the only morality they recognize, therefore, is what will advance the cause or socialism."
Author: Ronald Reagan

40. "We in the revivalist tradition have viewed grace only in terms of privatized, individualized spirituality. Give people enough Jesus to save their souls, move them to an emotional decision, help them get their hearts right and acquire a more responsible morality, and that will be enough. But that is not enough. It is not even the beginning of enough. God was concerned about those living in dire suffering long before Bono, Angelina Jolie, or George Clooney turned into social activists."
Author: Ronnie McBrayer

41. "Of course 'Hamlet' is a debate about the nature and morality of revenge and whether it is right to do something to assuage your angry feelings."
Author: Samuel West

42. "Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest."
Author: Saul D. Alinsky

43. "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."
Author: Stanley Milgram

44. "It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle."
Author: Steven L. Peck

45. "Self-love is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others."
Author: Thomas Jefferson

46. "The entire Jesus concept, that human sacrifice should be the substratum of a moral religion of love, strikes me as incongruous. God condemned us and Jesus saved us, and they are actually the same being? Christianity is the idea that you are so abhorrent that God had to kill himself. He had to embody the human form and send himself on a bizarre suicide mission just to revoke the disgustingness of the humans he created. I balk at suggestions that these ideas dictate to the concepts of morality and love."
Author: Trevor Treharne

47. "We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success."
Author: Václav Havel

48. "Society has wrongly driven the concept of immorality down to only the most debased and despicable behaviors imaginable. Immorality is not subjective; it is anything that transgresses God's Word. Our mind, mouth and body are instruments of either immorality or Godliness. Why argue over the relatively few unclear issues in God's Word while regularly doing what He clearly prohibits?"
Author: William Branks

49. "Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built."
Author: William Masters

50. "…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality."
Author: Yukio Mishima

Morality Quotes Pictures