Top 89 Moral Action Quotes
#1. Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.
Christopher Hitchens
#2. In Nurturant Parent morality, the teenage girl is "in trouble," she needs help and deserves empathy (moral-action Category 2 - helping).
George Lakoff
#3. Do you suppose that sacrifice is the hallmark of moral action?
Just stop to consider whether sacrifice is not involved in every action that is done with deliberation, the worst as well as the best.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#5. I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.
Don Cupitt
#6. Unless the will is free, man has no freedom; and if he has no freedom he is not a moral agent, that is, he is incapable of moral action and also of moral character.
Charles Grandison Finney
#7. 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
#8. Empathy makes you more aware of other people's suffering, but it's not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.
David Brooks
#9. If an action must be taken that will benefit the majority at the cost of the minority, is it morally indefensible?
If an action taken for the benefit of a majority occurs at the expense of a minority, is it moral action?
Garth Nix
#10. I'm not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence.
Paul Bloom
#11. For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
Joyce Carol Oates
#12. A person who is seeking to feel justification for some action might move from "What you've done angers me" to "What you've done is wrong." Popular justifications include the moral high ground of righteous indignation and the more simple equation known by its biblical name: an eye for an eye.
Gavin De Becker
#13. I enjoyed Old Man's War immensely. A space war story with fast action, vivid characters, moral complexity and cool speculative physics, set in a future you almost want to live into, and a universe you sincerely hope you don't live in already.
Ken MacLeod
#15. That which does not correspond to the truth or to the moral norm possesses, objectively, no right either to existence or to propagation or to action.
Pope Pius XII
#16. All virtue lies in individual action, in inward energy, in self determination. There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd even toward the best objective.
William Ellery Channing
#17. 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
#18. Protest to be effective, must be followed by resolute action and at this crisis in world history when materialistic energy aims at overthrowing spiritual energy and moral values, action needs to develop into a world crusade for the Spiritual Humanity.
Vida Goldstein
#19. I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
#20. Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck.
Richard Just
#21. Deeds, rather than words, express my concept of the part religion should play in everyday life. I have watched constantly that in our movie work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether it deals with fable or with stories of living action.
Walt Disney Company
#22. If the blaming action produces a false apology, patronization of the moral code, and false promises with no intention of complying with moral law, it prevents satisfaction in the victim.
Karin Huffer
#23. What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world's poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?
Anne Lamott
#24. I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end.
Geraldine Brooks
#26. Anarchism ... stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
Emma Goldman
#27. The custom of prefixing or appending to historical narratives an estimate of the character and personality of the principal agent is of doubtful advantage at the best of times - it either imparts a specious unity to the action or permits apology or condemnation on moral and emotional grounds.
Ronald Syme
#28. We have complete choice as individuals: the only decisions we can take are our own. And yet so many species use the state of being an individual as an excuse for inaction, helplessness and irresponsibility.No situation is so overwhelming that action is pointless.
Targassat of Surang.
Karen Traviss
#29. Only a moral education based on free inner discipline can bring to bear a salutary action and lead to a true morality.
African Spir
#30. Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.
Ayn Rand
#31. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.
Edgar Allan Poe
#32. As noble as our intentions might be as we assume a leadership role, we are always one errant, unthinking action or careless word away from getting outside the boundaries of good judgment or even the moral absolutes that must frame all decisions.
Tim Irwin
#33. I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#34. Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#35. both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices, and both courses of action reveal something important about the individual involved. Contrary
Glenn Greenwald
#36. Sometimes you have to risk life, in order to live, and gamble death, to sacrifice life.
Anthony Liccione
#37. The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'
Thornton Wilder
#38. Action isn't a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it's an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts.
Joanna Macy
#39. It is as true in morals as in physics that all force is imperishable; therefore the consequences of a human action never cease.
Tennessee Celeste Claflin
#40. The action we take in the name of love,those are moral or immoral.and normally it wouldn't matter
Cassandra Clare
#41. If leaders don't know how to put their words into action, if they follow the wrong paths and take the wrong turns, then their sense of moral purpose can quickly give way to cynicism, frustration, and fading commitment.
Viviane Robinson
#42. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.
David Hume
#43. But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.
Primo Levi
#44. Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.
Christopher Hitchens
#45. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.
Ayn Rand
#46. Moral compromise rejects the concept of right and wrong. It says that everyone is equal, all desires are equally valid, all action is equally valid, so everyone should compromise to get along.
Terry Goodkind
#47. Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! This is what all moral teaching comes to.
Pyotr Kropotkin
#48. The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#49. As a democratic society, Malawi has a moral obligation to ensure that each and every injustice, whether through acts of commission or omission, is met with deliberate and tangible action.
Joyce Banda
#50. All that science can achieve is a perfect knowledge and a perfect understanding of the action of natural and moral forces.
Hermann Von Helmholtz
#51. The name of Jesus, like a secret charm, awakened similar emotions in the hearts of all the converts, and called immediately into action every feeling of moral loveliness, and every desire of dutiful obedience, which constitute Christian purity.
John Strachan
#52. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.
Herbert Marcuse
#53. The awakenings of remorse, virtuous shame and indignation, the glow of moral approbation if they do not lead to action, grow less and less vivid every time they occur, till at length the mind grows absolutely callous.
Anna Letitia Barbauld
#54. For the wagons that bear grain to the whole of mankind without any moral basis for their action may most cold-bloodedly exclude an important part of mankind from the enjoyment of what they bear, something that has already happened ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#55. For a long time afterwards, in prison, when moral change took place in me, I thought of that moment, recalled what I could of it, and considered it. I remembered for an instant, before the action I had a terrible consciousness I was killing a defenseless woman, my wife!
Leo Tolstoy
#56. Only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgement can be regarded as moral, pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality.
Ayn Rand
#57. Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
Ayn Rand
#58. One of my colleagues in Birmingham University, where I come from,' said Trevair, 'is a moral philosopher. He taught me that one of the ways to judge a course of action is to consider what company it puts one in. I doubt if that's very good philosophy, but I find it a good rule of thumb.
Jill Paton Walsh
#59. 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
#60. To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.
Richard Perle
#61. Moral truth, resting entirely upon the ascertained consequences of actions, supposes a process of observation and reasoning.
Frances Wright
#62. These things were in my mind from the first moment I entered the vocal booth. The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one's action.
Patti Smith
Patti Smith
#63. An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Immanuel Kant
#64. [R]eason is ... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will ...
Immanuel Kant
#65. Churchill used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life and that of Britain and its place in the world.
Winston S. Churchill
#66. 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
#67. To know another person is to Know How to live and work with her. To know another person in a moral sense is to Know How to respect her... Respect must show in action.
Kathryn Pyne Addelson
#68. I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.
George Will
#69. God has so framed us as to make freedom of choice and action the very basis of all moral improvement, and all our faculties, mental and moral, resent and revolt against the idea of coercion.
William Matthews
#70. The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.
Hans Hartung
#71. I feel a moral obligation to speak out at this key moment in human history - it is a moment for action.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#72. As for moral courage, it is very rare, he said, to find that kind found at 2 o'clock in the morning; that is to say, courage in the face of the unexpected.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#73. I read these words which are the sum of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the casuists: When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain.
Voltaire
#74. If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.
Ludwig Von Mises
#75. Do not perform an action for the reward it may bring. Perform it because it is right; it is dharma.
Shelley Schanfield
#76. In the name of anti-discrimination those who uphold moral values are discriminated against while those who violate such values receive affirmative action.
Robert A. J. Gagnon
#77. Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cant. But I dont believe that the Federal Government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved.
Jimmy Carter
#78. Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, that which all things aim at.
Aristotle.
#79. Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics. Here we find ideas of moral wrong and moral right associated with something else than beneficial action. The consequent is, we lose sight of the real basis of morals, and substitute a false one.
Frances Wright
#80. [M]an places the aim of his action in God, but God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#81. Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral perspective, is the answer to most problems.
Dean Koontz
#82. It seems to have been my luck to stumble into various forms of progress, to which I have been of the smallest possible use; yet for whose sake I have suffered the discomfort attending all action in moral improvements, without the happiness of knowing that this was clearly quite worth while.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
#83. Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered ...
Thomas Merton
#84. Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would ... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#85. The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness
Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#86. With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.
Louis Kronenberger
#87. Moral conduct,or duty,is defined as the obligation to select that action which will achieve more good than any alternative action....
G.E. Moore
#88. Just as rust produced by iron corrodes iron, so is the violator of moral law destroyed by his own wrong action.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#89. Man must cast out of himself everything which separates him from God. He must will to live the divine life, and he must rise above all moral temptations; he must forsake every course of action that is not in accord with his highest ideals.
Wallace D. Wattles
