Top 100 Moral Act Quotes
#1. Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do alongside the eternal laws of God, and seeing how it stands by those laws of God.
Lyman Abbott
#2. Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act, an act of the whole nature.-Belief or unbelief is a test of a man's whole spiritual condition, because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.
Alexander MacLaren
#3. Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.
Robert M. Hutchins
#4. Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
Lillian Hellman
#5. It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#6. 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
#7. Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#9. Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
Vaclav Havel
#10. In conclusion it may be said that sin may be defined as lack of conformity to the moral law of God, either in act, disposition, or state
Louis Berkhof
#11. Pro-life advocates don't oppose abortion because they find it distasteful; they oppose it because it violates rational moral principles. The negative emotional response follows from the moral wrongness of the act.
Scott Klusendorf
#12. My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it.
Al Gore
#13. For Aristotle, it's not enough simply to act in accordance with the reason once in a while. We must cultivate habits of virtue that develop into a firmly established moral character over a lifetime.
John Mark Reynolds
#14. Morality and honor are not to be confused. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H.L. Mencken
#15. Until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
George Santayana
#16. 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
#17. No one is born with good character; it's not a hereditary trait. And it isn't determined by a single noble act. Character is established by conscientious adherence to moral values, not by lofty rhetoric or good intentions.
Michael Josephson
#18. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral;
Saul D. Alinsky
#19. We have a moral obligation to act happy even if we don't feel it
Dennis Prager
#20. Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#22. And the sad fact is that the church, both now and at far too many times in its history, has found it easier to act as if it were selling the sugar of moral and spiritual achievement rather than the salt ofJesus' passion and death.
Robert Farrar Capon
#23. There are three things healthy people most need to do - to be creatively productive, to render service, and to act in accordance with their moral impulses. In all three respects modern society frustrates most people most of the time.
E.F. Schumacher
#24. Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#25. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires-it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.
Robert P. George
#26. To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.
Warren E. Burger
#27. The notion that the careless sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian, though well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life will not stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and the greater the folly the greater the fool.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#28. From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical "I gotcha!" It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.
Stanley Hauerwas
#29. When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanor Roosevelt
#30. Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.
Gary L. Francione
#31. The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.
Robert A. Nisbet
#32. If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ... its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling - killing.
Leo Tolstoy
#33. A public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside ... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast?
Jodi Picoult
#34. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...
Aldous Huxley
#35. Writers are the moral purifiers of the culture. We may not be pure ourselves but we must tell the truth, which is a purifying act.
Rita Mae Brown
#36. All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work - and that which is its source - as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost..
Ayn Rand
#37. What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#38. 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
#39. Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life.
Michael Chabon
#40. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.
Gary Wolf
#41. It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.
Tim O'Brien
#42. Force is a physical power; I do not see how its effects could produce morality. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a moral duty?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#43. Us atheist people, we believe we have to act properly and honestly for a moral principle and not because we expect an award in Paradise.
Margherita Hack
#44. Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#45. A war not only arises, but derives its nature , from the political ideas, the moral sentiments, and the international relations obtaining at the moment when it breaks out. This amounts to saying:;: try and know why and with the help of what you are going to act; then you will find out how to act.
Ferdinand Foch
#46. Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Anthony Burgess
#48. How inestimably important in its moral results - and therefore how praiseworthy in itself - is the act of eating and drinking! The social virtues center in the stomach. A man who is not a better husband, father, and brother after dinner than before is, digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man.
Wilkie Collins
#49. What more does man want to know than that the hand or power that made these things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe this with the force it is impossible to repel, if he permits his reason to act, and his rule of moral life will follow of course.
Thomas Paine
#50. A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such.
John Dewey
#51. Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.
George McGovern
#52. Learning by faith and from experience are two of the central features of the Father's plan of happiness. The Savior preserved moral agency through the Atonement and made it possible for us to act and to learn by faith.
David A. Bednar
#53. As a nuclear power - as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has a moral responsibility to act.
Barack Obama
#54. We're all agreed that climate change is one of the greatest and most daunting challenges of our age. We have a moral imperative to act and act now.
David Cameron
#55. The idea I'll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling - whatever one chooses to call this - is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we're better off without it.
Paul Bloom
#56. The moral?" Hermes asked. "Goodness, you act like it's a fable. It's a true story. Does truth have a moral?
Rick Riordan
#58. To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behaviour as individuals within the group.
Friedrich Hayek
#59. When we are confronted with extreme situations, we forget about moral issues; we simply act and must then accept the consequences.
Park Chan-wook
#60. [S]tatism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others - on the grand scale. There is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other social program.
Leonard Read
#61. As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.
Joel Bakan
#62. An act of violence against any innocent person eludes moral justification, disgraces the millions of Americans and people throughout the world who have united in peaceful protest against police brutality, and dishonors our proud inheritance of nonviolent resistance.
Benjamin Crump
#63. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
William James
#64. You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.
Barbara Hall
#65. Global interconnectedness has led to the emergence of a new political power, that of consumers and their associations. It is good for people to realize that purchasing is always a moral - and not simply economic - act.
Pope Benedict XVI
#66. For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
Paul Farmer
#67. If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government,
Peter Singer
#68. When I study and ponder moral agency and its eternal consequences, I realize that we are truly spirit children of God and therefore should act accordingly.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#69. We are easily deceived about government because we are inclined to accept the following fallacies: (a) Anything legal is also moral. (b) We are not individually responsible for government action. (c) A different moral law applies to men in concert than it does when they act alone.
H. Verlan Andersen
#70. There is so much hate among people, so much contempt inside people who'd like you to think they're moral, that they have to hire prizefighters to do their hating for them. And we do. We get into a ring and act out other people's hates.
Floyd Patterson
#71. The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view and act on death as a dignified moral and godly choice for those suffering with terminal illnesses.
John Shelby Spong
#72. Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).
George Bernard Shaw
#73. For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .
Robert Charles Wilson
#74. To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.
Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth
#75. To engage in civil disobedience is to feel the abundance of courage, the gratitude for a democracy that still invites us to speak from our hearts, to act from our conscience and have faith in the consequences of moral action. Abundance is a form of consciousness.
Terry Tempest Williams
#76. How roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls.
Eleanor Catton
#77. If I'm on my own, I'll speak to 'Monkey' to generate new stuff for the act. I mean, I don't do it for moral support, although I wouldn't say that's out of the question. In fact, I could do it, I might do it ... yes, I think I should actually start doing it more.
Nina Conti
#78. The difference between a moral person and a person of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, made out of weakness and tries to make amends with their life when they find the opportunity to say they are sorry is lost.
Shannon L. Alder
#79. Together with the social responsibility of businesses, there is also the social responsibility of consumers. Every person ought to have the awareness that 'purchasing is always a moral-and not simply an economic-act.
Pope Francis
#80. We (atheists) act in good conscience because we believe in moral principles, not because we expect a reward in Heaven.
Margherita Hack
#81. Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#82. The final act of an unraveling society isn't immoral behavior; it's canonizing immoral behavior as a 'new normal' and celebrating it as a 'moral victory.'
Jeff Iorg
#83. In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.
John Gardner
#84. I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.
Phillip Lopate
#85. You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you're not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that's going on. Try to make yourself aware of what's happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
Bill Ayers
#86. Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.
Thomas Jefferson
#87. Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a persons decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person.
Thomas Szasz
#88. Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say no. I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible.
Aleister Crowley
#89. How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?
Auberon Herbert
#90. Catallactics does not ask whether or not the consumers are right, noble, generous, wise, moral, patriotic, or church-going. It is concerned not with why they act, but only with how they act.
Ludwig Von Mises
#91. We Indians are Latin America's moral reserve. We act according to a universal law that consists of three basic principles: do not steal, do not lie and do not be idle.
Evo Morales
#92. ...Act upon a maxim which, at the same time, involves its own universal validity for every rational being.
Immanuel Kant
#93. Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.
Charles Spurgeon
#94. Each department and institution has its own authorities and responsibilities, and they act on that basis. It is wrong to even compare such actions to what is done in Guantanamo or elsewhere by the Americans. They do not stand on a high moral platform to preach to others.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
#95. Even Clark French's novels exerted a tenacious and combative goodwill: his main characters, lost souls and serial sinners, always found redemption; the act of redeeming usually followed a moral low point; the novels predictably ended in a crescendo of benevolence.
John Irving
#96. After each creative act one has to be sustained by one's strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don't know what, lest one tumble.
Etty Hillesum
#97. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.
C.S. Lewis
#98. No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.
P.D. James
#99. The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
William Empson
#100. Atheists would teach men to be moral now, not because God offers as an inducement reward by and by, but because in the virtuous act itself immediate good is insured to the doer and the circle surrounding him.
Charles Bradlaugh
