Great Moral Quotes

#1. To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

Anne Lamott

#2. If we were all responsible for the misdeeds of the governments that represent us, thought Isabel, then the moral burden would be just too great.

Alexander McCall Smith

#3. Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.

Charlotte M. Mason

#4. Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law ... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#5. I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.

Alexander McCall Smith

#6. I am extraordinarily lucky, I was born in a family of strong moral values, and in my life I was able to do what I liked best: debuts, great theatres, but above all, inner and deep satisfaction.

Jose Carreras

#7. High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

Christopher Hitchens

#8. The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.

Samuel Smiles

#9. All the great crimes of history, lest we forget, have their genesis in the moral wilderness of their times.

Eskinder Nega

#10. The current moral decay perceived in society has often been blamed on the lack of God in the public schools. During the Great Depression God was prominent in the schools, hence She must have caused the depression. Challenge my logic.

Eric Welch

#11. I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.

Tim Crane

#12. Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.

Shana Alexander

#13. We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.

Malcolm Gladwell

#14. The fact that we did not give the demonstrators in Iran our moral support when a young woman named Neda bled to death in the streets of Iran will go down as one of the great mistakes of the 21st Century.

John McCain

#15. Strong faith is more important than high intelligence. Moral force is the only force that can accomplish great things in the world,

Lucas Delattre

#16. There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

Derek Bok

#17. Character - We describe the character of a person in reference to moral judgments about the worthiness of a person. Thus, to have a strong, great or honorable character is to be a person of merit, worthy of admiration and honor.

Michael Josephson

#18. Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

Richard Rohr

#19. It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.

Anatole France

#20. In the beginning I thought, and still think, he did great good in giving support and encouragement to this movement. But I did not believe then, and have never believed since, that these ills can be settled by partisan political methods. They are moral and economic questions.

Ray Stannard Baker

#21. There are some men, great men, who were once pious and moral; these men act unwisely and are driven by the torment of their souls

Paul W. Feenstra

#22. It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.

Auberon Herbert

#23. There is a great advantage when work and economic gain is viewed from the perspective of moral and spiritual significance.

Sunday Adelaja

#24. Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern.

Lyman Abbott

#25. It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.

Antony Beevor

#26. Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense, someone must cry: Thou shalt not!

F Scott Fitzgerald

#27. The pope has been called many things, historic figure, spiritual leader, moral force. But a growing chorus of voices has begun to refer to him as John Paul II the Great, in other words, as a saint.

Chris Matthews

#28. The privilege against self-incrimination is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to make himself civilized ... The Fifth is a lone sure rock in time of storm ... a symbol of the ultimate moral sense of the community, upholding the best in us.

Erwin Griswold

#29. A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

George Bernard Shaw

#30. If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#31. We make a great fuss about national conscience, but it consists mainly in insisting upon everyone ascribing our national policy to highly moral motives, rather than in examining what our motives really are.

Joan Robinson

#32. I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.

C.S. Lewis

#33. This party spirit has so ill an effect on our morals, it has likewise a very great one upon our judgments.

Joseph Addison

#34. As a result, the highly civilized man can endure incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain. Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great advantage over the savage.

Lafcadio Hearn

#35. Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.

Jimmy Carter

#36. All I can hope to do is instill great morality in my son and trust him along the way. The music he listens to or how he chooses to wear his hair doesn't define his moral compass, and if he wants to listen to country music and wear a cowboy hat too, that's fine.

Mark Hoppus

#37. If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.

John Stuart Mill

#38. Sometimes things end worse for one side than the other. These 'injured parties' always seem to see themselves as victims of a moral outrage. They never feel simply rejected, but also abused. I've known many women who were great believers in the curative powers of indignation.

Lionel Shriver

#39. My Dad is my hero. He's 85 now and he is in great health. He is handsome and strong. He has an incredible moral and ethical backbone. I couldn't have been luckier with my parents.

Harry Connick Jr.

#40. To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire - that is to give him a real moral strength.

Ellen Key

#41. A machine is a great moral educator. If a horse or a donkey won't go, men lose their tempers and beat it; if a machine won't go, there is no use beating it. You have to think and try till you find what is wrong. That is real education.

Gilbert Murray

#42. When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man's use, as they would soon decay and return to the earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth.

George Nakashima

#43. This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#44. Dr. Stockmann. I have already told you that what I want to speak about
is the great discovery I have made lately
the discovery that all the
sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the hole fabric of our
civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.

Henrik Ibsen

#45. Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

Anita Brookner

#46. The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.

Camille Paglia

#47. For many years, I tried to make New Year's resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.

Henry Rollins

#48. The moral virtues, without religion are but cold, lifeless, and insipid; it is only religion which opens the mind to great conceptions, fills it with the most sublime ideas, and warms the soul with more than sensual pleasures.

Joseph Addison

#49. His moral courage led him to question a great wrong and refuse, backed by his men, to take part in a horrific slaughter of innocents, when other men, such as Harry Richmond, took advantage of being suddenly unfettered by conventional standards to do whatever the darkest side of human nature desired.

Tom Bensing

#50. Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.

Charles Wagner

#51. Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the social and the moral.

Catharine Beecher

#52. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives.

Albert Einstein

#53. The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

Lucy Stone

#54. I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#55. Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#56. We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.

Jonathan Haidt

#57. He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray

Immanuel Kant

#58. But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail.

Robert A. Heinlein

#59. Let's state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.

Richard Rohr

#60. All the things that make the character of an individual great, comes from the moral values he or she possesses. Those are the things that give such an individual, strength, vision, integrity, courage and understanding of how to behave toward others.

Ellen J. Barrier

#61. If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

D.H. Lawrence

#62. Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life ... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.

Margaret Thatcher

#63. Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue.

Judith Martin

#64. It is a great thing to see physical courage, and greater still to see moral courage, but the greatest to see of all is spiritual courage; oh, to see a person who will stand true to the integrity of Jesus Christ no matter what he or she goes through!

Oswald Chambers

#65. A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

George Eliot

#66. I would have let you shoot me without further ado! But it is not possible to hang the German Reichsmarschall! I cannot permit this ... I have no moral obligation to submit to the justice of my enemies. I have therefore chosen the manner of death of the great Hannibal.

Hermann Goring

#67. Racial injustice around the world. Poverty. War. When man solves these three great problems he will have squared his moral progress with his scientific progress. And, more importantly, he will have learned the practical art of living in harmony.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#68. Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

Octavio Paz

#69. We must get back to a very strong Christianity ... Christianity shaped America and England, and we need to get back to those moral foundations that made us great.

George Carey

#70. The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

Dante Alighieri

#71. I'm not Catholic, but I have a great deal of respect for Pope John Paul. I think that he has stood firm on the moral issues, and I admire him greatly.

James Dobson

#72. The great benefactors of individuals and of communities are the enlightened educators: the wise-teaching, mental and moral instructors and exemplars of our times.

Dorothea Dix

#73. We've got the science, we've had the debate. The moral imperative is on the table. Great creativity is needed to take it all, make it simple and sharp. To make it connect. To make it make people want to act.

Andy Hobsbawm

#74. It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life ... Islam has also had moments of great splendor and decadence in the course of its history.

Pope Benedict XVI

#75. If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership.

Will Rogers

#76. The great event on Calvary ... is an eternal reminder to a power drunk generation that love is the most durable power in the world, and that it is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. Only through achieving this love can you expect to matriculate into the university of eternal life.

Martin Luther

#77. By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution.

Steven Pinker

#78. Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

Shirley Hazzard

#79. All general maxims in politics ought to be established with great caution; and that irregular and extraordinary appearances are frequently discovered in the moral, as well as in the physical world

David Hume

#80. I did it for political, moral reasons, thinking that I was making this great sacrifice, but it was absolutely necessary; I was not going to contribute to the violence in the world anymore.

Alicia Silverstone

#81. If we are not inwardly wrought upon, and changed by the powerful operations of the Holy Spirit, and our moral actions proceed from a principle of a new nature, however we may call ourselves Christians, we shall be found naked at the great day.

George Whitefield

#82. With a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness; for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

Theodore Roosevelt

#83. In a world of unrest and fear, political turmoil and moral drift, I testify that Jesus is the Christ - that He is the living Bread and living Water - still, yet, and always the great Shield of safety in our lives.

Jeffrey R. Holland

#84. People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

Penn Jillette

#85. Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

Susan Sontag

#86. Religions, moral systems, her own included, wee like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great ditance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to judge?

Ian McEwan

#87. Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.

William Lloyd Garrison

#88. Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.

Marie Curie

#89. Americans are blessed with great plenty; we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine.

Adam Schiff

#90. The great laws of the moral world do not vary, however different, under different dispensations, may be the authoritative enunciation of truth, or the means of propagating and defending it.

Henry Parry Liddon

#91. For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.

Leland Ryken

#92. You can take the high moral ground intellectually, but if it ever happens to you personally, I don't know that I could honestly say that I wouldn't want to kill someone who took someone away from me. So, it's a rich, fertile ground for great characters and great storytelling. That was the impetus.

Richard LaGravenese

#93. To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds.

Karsten Harries

#94. You know, this country today, it seems to me
it's about fear. And it shouldn't be about fear. It should be about hope and optimism and creativity and accepting a challenge and being a moral leader and being a great nation.

Tom Vilsack

#95. A great principle of moral advancement, on par with "Love thy neighbor" and "All men are created equal," is the one on the bumper sticker: "Shit happens.

Steven Pinker

#96. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

Michael Pollan

#97. Moral courage is more a rare commodity than bravery in a battle or great intelligence.

John F. Kennedy

#98. Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity.

Scott Farris

#99. So great is the effect of cleanliness upon man, that it extends even to his moral character. Virtue never dwelt long with filth; nor do I believe there ever was a person scrupulously: attentive to cleanliness, who was a consummate villain.

Benjamin Thompson

#100. America indeed has become a progressive nation, if we understand "progressive" to mean progressing away from God, his incomparable blessings, and the moral foundation that made America great, and advancing toward a mythical utopia where mankind is in control of mankind (think "Lord of the Flies").

Ron Brackin