MORALITY QUOTES V

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 does not derive its nature from books, but from the fitness of things.

ETHAN ALLEN

Reason: The Only Oracle of Man

Tags: Ethan Allen


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

Tags: Lisa Randall


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

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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

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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

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Almost every Englishman imagines he is moral because he objects to immorality--in others.

CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM

The Maxims of Marmaduke

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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

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Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

Islanders and the Fisher of Men

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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

Tags: Carl Jung


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

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He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD.

SOLOMON

Proverbs 17:15


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

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All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

VOLTAIRE

attributed, Day's Collacon

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People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality.

FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL

Philosophical Fragments


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

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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

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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

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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


Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

SIGMUND FREUD

The Future of an Illusion

Tags: Sigmund Freud