Top 55 Individual Morality Quotes
#1. By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.
Milton Friedman
#2. Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.
Wendy Kaminer
#3. To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.
Jane Addams
#4. You're asking the government to control individual morality. This is a government that can't buy a toilet seat for under $600.
Peter McWilliams
#5. Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.
Bell Hooks
#6. Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#7. If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are.
Will Self
#8. You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [ ... ] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.
Terry Pratchett
#9. Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73
Gilles Deleuze
#10. In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.
Criss Jami
#11. Greaser ' didn't have anything to do with it. My buddy over there wouldn't have done it. Maybe you would have done the same thing, maybe a friend of yours wouldn't have. It's the individual.
S.E. Hinton
#12. Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.
W. Somerset Maugham
#13. It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.
Christian Lous Lange
#14. The political Right likes to champion individual rights and individual liberty, but it has also worked to enforce morality in relation to abortion, gambling, and homosexuality.
Dave Brat
#15. Foucault thus provides a sophisticated, language-based version of the class antagonisms of Marx - he relies on beliefs about the inherent evil of the individual's class position, or professional position, seen as 'discourse', regardless of the morality of his or her individual conduct.
Christopher Butler
#16. The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.
Joel Stein
#17. War is elevating, because the individual disappears before the great conception of the state ... What a perversion of morality to wish to abolish heroism among men!
Heinrich Von Treitschke
#18. My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
George Eliot
#19. Punishment is now unfashionable ... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
Thomas Szasz
#20. Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#21. Secret of man's Mortality; Man has transformed from immortal to become a mere mortal being all because of our mental love for sex and evil.
Auliq Ice
#22. A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.
Ronald Reagan
#23. The former morality, namely Kant's, demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men: that was a very naive thing;
Friedrich Nietzsche
#24. The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words. Years
Arkady Strugatsky
#25. I do not judge the individual based on their belief. If I were to, then I would, undoubtedly, be no better than the (religious) system that I frown upon.
Travis Culliton
#26. A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual.
Hakan Nesser
#27. All true religion, all true morality, all true mysticism have but one object, and that is to act on humanity, collective and individual, in such a manner that it shall correspond efficiently with the great law of development, and co-operate consciously therewith to achieve the end of development.
A. E. Waite
#28. Morality is not defined and cannot be defined by individual choice.
Rush Limbaugh
#29. With nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.
Thomas Jefferson
#30. My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.
Michael Shermer
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.
C.S. Lewis
#34. Just as altruism tells an individual that however much he is sacrificing, his duty is to sacrifice more, the Progressives concluded that however much Americans were giving, morality required them to give more.
Yaron Brook
#35. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
Max Weber
#36. 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
#37. Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand
#38. One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
#39. 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
#40. No individual anonymous participant can influence the prices and therefore you really can speculate in the market without paying attention to morality. That's one of the positive features of markets. That's why they function.
George Soros
#41. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#42. A nation's domestic and foreign policies and actions should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation.
Jimmy Carter
#43. What the individual can do is to give a fine example, and to have the courage to uphold ethical values .. in a society of cynics.
Albert Einstein
#44. The morality of individual liberation (which is the subject of this chapter) is mainly practiced by refraining from physical and verbal actions that cause harm.
Dalai Lama XIV
#45. There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
George Eliot
#46. Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.
Robert A. Heinlein
#47. The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#49. [The answer of Solon to the question 'Which is the most perfect popular government?']
That where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution.
Solon
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Contemporary Christians have declared war on individual immorality but seem remarkably silent about the evil of systems, especially corporate greed and malfeasance. (p. 176)
Robin R. Meyers
#53. All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.
Jean Piaget
#54. Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#55. Our enemy of international terrorism respects no laws of warfare or morality, and its individual members take innocent lives, just to create chaos for news cameras.
Mark Kennedy
