Top 100 Great Moral Quotes
#1. 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
#2. High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Christopher Hitchens
#3. 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
#4. He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray
Immanuel Kant
#5. The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Dante Alighieri
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
Agnes Repplier
#12. And there is the matter of abortion. We must with calmness and resolve help the vast majority of our fellow Americans understand that the more than 112 million abortions performed in America in 1980 amount to a great moral evil, an assault on the sacredness of human life.
Ronald Reagan
#13. The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America.
Mark A. Noll
#14. Hail to the man who went through life always helping others, knowing no fear, and to whom aggressiveness and resentment are alien. Such is the stuff of which the great moral leaders are made.
Albert Einstein
#15. It's my belief that by demonizing Saddam, by raising the stakes in this war to the point where we're talking about a great moral crusade, that Bush in fact planted the seeds of discontent in the country, because this was fundamentally a limited war with limited objectives and with limited gains.
Rick Atkinson
#16. The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#17. Defeating Human Trafficking is a great moral calling of our time
Condoleezza Rice
#18. I really do admire you a bit. You're an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I'm an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I'm in an ideal position to appreciate it. - Colonel Korn
Joseph Heller
#20. The great moral question of the 21st century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?
Eben Moglen
#21. Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
Aldo Leopold
#22. We think slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the territories, where our votes will reach it.
Abraham Lincoln
#23. The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.
Elizabeth Blackwell
#24. The great moral teachers of humanity were in a way artistic geniuses in the art of living.
Albert Einstein
#25. You're an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I'm an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I'm in an ideal position to appreciate it.
Joseph Heller
#26. Politics is dirty. Politics is exciting. Politics is often very, very difficult and disappointing. And I really would rather the world would be a little more like it was when my dad was young, where you knew pretty much where people stood on the great moral issues.
James Dobson
#27. The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
Jean-Luc Godard
#28. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
Tom Stoppard
#29. The great moral powers of the soul are faith, hope, and love.
Ellen G. White
#30. I believe in both a creative and personal God, a divinely ordered universe, that man has an innate moral sense, and that Jesus was a great moral teacher, perhaps the greatest the world has witnessed.
Thomas Jefferson
#31. We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#33. One derives great moral strength from a cup of coffee, I said.
Chaim Potok
#34. Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.
Nicolas Chamfort
#35. The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.
Fulton J. Sheen
#36. I want to have enough data, so I won't write myself into thin air, so that I can extrapolate and give you this secret human infrastructure. The only way I sate my own curiosity is to create this from scratch. There must be commanding love stories. There must be great moral cost.
James Ellroy
#37. Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement's origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography.
David Levering Lewis
#38. CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.
Ambrose Bierce
#39. It is a deplorable fact that many Christians are so accustomed to a certain creed and dogma of their own that they will adhere to it even at the sacrifice of the great moral laws of love and mercy.
Ed Buckner
#40. There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
Agnes Repplier
#41. Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations.
James Dobson
#42. Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within - for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster.
Suetonius
#43. Bill Clinton was not a symbol. People did not invest in him their idea of what America should be or, worse, their pride in what they thought America had become. There was no great moral self-congratulation in having elected a president from Arkansas.
Charlie Pierce
#44. In my own view, the life expectancy of Native Americans in the United States is one of the really great moral crises that we face.
Jim Yong Kim
#45. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.
Theodore Roosevelt
#46. I got really good input up until the age of 11, which is perfect. That's when adolescence starts, when I would have really wanted to rebel. Up until that point, though, it didn't feel like doctrine, and it gave me a great moral structure.
Bat For Lashes
#47. The highest grossing films have great, moral messages - not dirty, base themes, so we're trying to get producers to make more of the uplifting movies.
Morgan Brittany
#48. I think God rarely gives to one man, or one set of men, more than one great moral victory to win.
Lucy Stone
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. All the great crimes of history, lest we forget, have their genesis in the moral wilderness of their times.
Eskinder Nega
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Strong faith is more important than high intelligence. Moral force is the only force that can accomplish great things in the world,
Lucas Delattre
#62. There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.
Derek Bok
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.
Anatole France
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. There is a great advantage when work and economic gain is viewed from the perspective of moral and spiritual significance.
Sunday Adelaja
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense, someone must cry: Thou shalt not!
F Scott Fitzgerald
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
George Bernard Shaw
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. This party spirit has so ill an effect on our morals, it has likewise a very great one upon our judgments.
Joseph Addison
#80. 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
#81. Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.
Jimmy Carter
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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.
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Anita Brookner
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives.
Albert Einstein
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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