Top 100 Human Morality Quotes
#1. The old gods have the beauty and goodness of the sun, the sea, the wind, the mountains, great wild animals; splendid, powerful, and dangerous realities that do not come within the sphere of human morality, and are in no way concerned about the human race.
A.H. Armstrong
#4. The very same 'mystery' that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.
Roger Scruton
#5. To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of "tower" ought to be reserved for the summit.
Frans De Waal
#6. Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things "which cannot be shared," and if they raise themselves to a point where they adopt an abstract principle superior to their egotisms. In other words, it can only be obtained by a betterment of human morality.
Julien Benda
#7. A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers, and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.
John F. Kennedy
#8. It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy.
Scott Turow
#9. If truth is what each of us believed, and we each believe differently, there would be no such thing as truth. Truth stands against what's false. If there is no true and false, light and dark, right and wrong, then there is nothing to guide human morality.
Jill Williamson
#10. The respect and protection of woman and of maternity should be raised to the position of an inalienable social duty and should become one of the principles of human morality.
Maria Montessori
#11. The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice.
Frans De Waal
#12. we ought to develop and practice a secular and human morality based on logical and scientific thinking.
Dr. Ramendra
#13. While it shows the gods as no better than the rest of us," she said, "at least, it shows them as no worse. See here the sources of human morality.
Roger Zelazny
#14. Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.
E. O. Wilson
#15. There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
#16. Our goals can only be achieved with a society that respects and equally protects the rights of every human being, old and young, rich and poor, regardless of gender, color, race, or creed. We must reject the initiation of violence by individuals or government as morally repugnant.
Ron Paul
#17. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
#18. It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.
Mohsin Hamid
#19. When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?
Rebecca McNutt
#20. Rational egoism is the only morality that is for human life; thus, it is the only morality that is actually moral. Those who choose to be rationally self-interested thereby make the most of their life - and they are morally good because of it.
Craig Biddle
#21. While some of them acknowledge the obligation of natural morality in their mode of conducting their cases, and preserve their individual character as gentlemen, there are others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland.
George Combe
#22. The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.
Richard Dawkins
#24. Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
Mikhail Bakunin
#25. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
Osamu Dazai
#26. The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
Sam Harris
#27. The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.
Charles Colson
#28. I think that as human beings we tend to compartmentalize, and we have a selective morality based on the situation we're in.
Richard Gere
#29. I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal - of a crow or a fox or an owl - and not of a normal human being. I
Peter Swanson
#30. All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.
George Berkeley
#31. The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
John Stuart Mill
#32. Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.
John Christopher
#33. Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.
Stefan Zweig
#34. To have thought that, with the right tests and the right lectures, I could be made into a cold-blooded, heartless killer. To have thought that I could ignore the beating of my own heart long enough to stop the beating of another's.
Jessica Khoury
#35. Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
H.L. Mencken
#36. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
Peter Singer
#37. Religion, when realized truly, can provide an extremely accurate moral compass to the human conscience, while politics on the other hand, when utilized properly can ensure the wellbeing of the society.
Abhijit Naskar
#38. The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power ...
Thomas Paine
#39. To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.
John Locke
#40. Morality and freedom are as certainly the only bases of the happiness and dignity of the human race as the system of Galileo is the true theory of the celestial motions.
Germaine De Stael
#41. There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity.
Nenia Campbell
#42. Man created Guilt. Guilt is the Perpetual Engine that Drives the World.
Vineet Raj Kapoor
#43. The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern.
Herman E. Daly
#44. Morality in its noblest forms remains inexplicable unless one takes into account that power of growth in the human soul which has led generation after generation from lower religious and ethical standards to higher ones which often clash with worldly advantages.
Ellen Key
#45. The morality of the 21st century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value simply and merely because it is human?
Wesley J. Smith
#46. To be ethical is to endeavor to find one's proper place in the larger scheme of things rather than to seek to assert human superiority over the natural world.
Gary Steiner
#47. What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilisation concerns man's behaviour to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.
Edward Mayhew
#48. He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.
Baruch Spinoza
#49. Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#50. Those moral laws on which all human excellence is founded - a love of truth in ourselves, and a sincere sympathy with our fellow-creatures.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#51. This is human nature: to find a morality that is comfortable and convenient and let it suffice for holiness. But it is not. So you ride your bike to work, or drive a hybrid car - but
John Eldredge
#52. The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
Georges Bataille
#53. Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of the human condition. No, they proclaimed morality as an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable.
Steven Erikson
#54. The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
Albert Einstein
#55. Morality is a fiction used by a herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior ones..!!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#56. The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
Salman Rushdie
#57. So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being?"
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#58. 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.
Christopher Moore
#59. As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?
Rowan Atkinson
#60. Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry to survive, Your Honor. Besides the advancement of truth, science and morality in general, the freedom of the press is a backbone of democracy. It exists to keep the government transparent, and the human instruments of government honest.
Kenneth Eade
#61. Kindness and generosity ... form the true morality of human actions.
Madame De Stael
#62. By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.
Mary Midgley
#63. Because the democratic process operates apart from the Church, it possesses no corrective against corrupted human nature beyond its own equally corrupt judiciary, which ends by judging not only points of law but morality itself.
Solange Hertz
#64. Why wouldn't I help? What good reason do I have as a human being with power and a sense of empathy and morality, why wouldn't I do something?
John Legend
#65. Human passions unbridled by morality and religion ... would break the stronges cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.
John Adams
#66. Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.
Mikhail Bakunin
#67. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.
Leo Tolstoy
#68. What good literature can do and does do - far greater than any importation of morality - is touch the human soul.
Karen Swallow Prior
#69. If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!
Adam Sedgwick
#70. I said it was a brutal thing.
No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it,
Mark Twain
#71. A single nation that has succeeded in lowering the intelligence, the morality, the quality of the human race almost throughout the globe is a phenomenon never before experienced since the beginning of time. I accuse the United States of being in a constant state of crime against humanity.
Henry De Montherlant
#72. Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.
Gary Steiner
#73. An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.
Richard Russo
#74. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.
Steven Pinker
#75. Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.
Havelock Ellis
#76. The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#77. Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did.
Criss Jami
#78. It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.
H.G.Wells
#79. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#80. With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig,
Richard Dawkins
#81. We can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality.
Gregory David Roberts
#82. In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.
John Quincy Adams
#83. If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.
Stephen McAndrew
#84. We as human beings should always shoot the goal for success. This means, perseverance is always the primary key for our success in society.
Saaif Alam
#85. In a Home it must be order or ruin. Order is to the house as morality to the human being - a sheet-anchor.
Julia McNair Wright
#87. Conservatism vests in and depends on the widespread, informed understanding of human nature, self-governance and the First Principle of Progress: free people interacting in free markets produce the greatest good for the greatest number always, but only, when tethered to virtue and morality.
Mary Matalin
#88. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
Garrett Hardin
#89. If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#90. You think you're superior to the others, don't you? We'll you're not. In fact you're worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.
Nenia Campbell
#91. Morality" in the ancient sense is a specifically traditioned way to live a full human life.
C. Kavin Rowe
#92. As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the "sacredness of human life" remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.
Leon Trotsky
#93. The destiny of the human race is to widen the gap separating it from the lower races of animals. Any code of morality which retains its permanence and authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it have changed, works against this upward progress of man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#94. There is a law in human nature which draws us to like what we passionately condemn.
George William Russell
#95. Worship is the highest moral act a human can perform, so the only basis and motivation for it that many people can conceive is the notion of morality as the disinterested performance of duty. But when worship is reduced to disinterested duty, it ceases to be worship. For worship is a feast.
John Piper
#96. The story of humanity can be written as the struggle to acknowledge all human beings as human beings.
J.S.B. Morse
#97. The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations.
Immanuel Kant
#98. Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#99. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects, man always has yielded woman the palm.
Maria Montessori
#100. Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.
Jerry Pournelle
