quotations about morality
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
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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
Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous--dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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?
Our world hinges on moral foundations. God has made it so. God has made the universe to be based on a moral law. So long as man disobeys it he is revolting against God. That's what we need in the world today: people who will stand for right and goodness. It's not enough to know the intricacies of zoology and biology, but we must know the intricacies of law. It is not enough to know that two and two makes four, but we've got to know somehow that it's right to be honest and just with our brothers. It's not enough to know all about our philosophical and mathematical disciplines, but we've got to know the simple disciplines of being honest and loving and just with all humanity. If we don't learn it, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own powers.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church, February 28, 1954
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
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Morality--like velocity--is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.
DAVID GERROLD
Star Hunt
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
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 a private and costly luxury.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
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
I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
"The Science of History", Representative Essays, February 5, 1864
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
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", Aphorisms
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Sceptical Essays
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