Moral Effort Quotes

#1. Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

Stephen Leacock

#2. The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group.

Lawrence Kohlberg

#3. Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#4. If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

E. O. Wilson

#5. Religious liberalism affirms the moral obligation to direct one's effort toward the establishment of a just and *loving* community.

James Luther Adams

#6. When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. (Technically a misquote, but I like the misquote better)

Plutarch

#7. Polygamists have no connection with us whatsoever. They don't belong to the church. There are actually no Mormon fundamentalists.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#8. Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.

Paulo Freire

#9. I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.

Stephen Jay Gould

#10. A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap.

Mitch Hedberg

#11. Our moral efforts are too feeble and falsely motivated to ever merit salvation.

Timothy Keller

#12. If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that particular blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.

Margaret Mead

#13. Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.

Ida B. Wells

#15. I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.

Barack Obama

#16. As far as one knows of heroines from history. I'm capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation - but steady every-day goodness is beyond me. I must be a moral kangaroo!

Elizabeth Gaskell

#17. Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.

Lewis H. Lapham

#18. I tend to stay up late, not because I'm partying but because it's the only time of the day when I'm alone and don't have to be performing.

Jim Carrey

#19. Balconies scare me, and I would never do a shoot on one. I am afraid of heights.

Olga Kurylenko

#20. Men's moral principles are weak enough without their being made subordinate to selfishness; and their selfishness is quite active enough, without any such effort as Christianity makes to constitute it the mainspring of all their conduct.

Lysander Spooner

#21. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

Oscar Wilde

#22. Greasy burgers and fries are so much more delicious than swallowing a cow whole.

Sarah Nicolas

#23. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

Henry David Thoreau

#24. It is not only our duty to America, but also to Ireland. We could not hope to succeed in our effort to make Ireland a Republic without the moral and material support of the liberty-loving citizens of these United States.

Thomas Francis Meagher

#25. using parking meters as walking sticks.

Tom Waits

#26. Reality television gave me an amazing feeling of moral and intellectual superiority without actually requiring any effort past moving the dogs to find the remote.

Jen Lancaster

#27. The dispassionate intellect, the open mind, the unprejudiced observer, exist in an exact sense only in a sort of intellectualist folk-lore; states even approaching them cannot be reached without a moral and emotional effort most of us cannot or will not make.

Wilfred Trotter

#28. When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#29. (J)ust as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#30. You've got to do some work now. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. Virtue is about moral excellence.

Francis Chan

#31. He understood it then. The potential, the utter, unbelievable freedom to be whoever existed underneath his skin.

Aleksandr Voinov

#32. Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern this Nation. This difficult effort will be the moral equivalent of war, except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.

Jimmy Carter

#33. Killing yourself slowly is still killing yourself. Wanting to die is not the same as wanting to come home. Recovery is hard work. Not wanting to die is hard work.

Blythe Baird

#34. He likes driving very fast on the wrong side of the road," said Sarah. "Which I can completely understand.

Hilary McKay

#35. Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

John Dewey

#36. If you have a comprehensive explanation for everything then it decreases uncertainty and anxiety and reduces your cognitive load. And if you can use that simplifying algorithm to put yourself on the side of moral virtue then you're constantly a good person with a minimum of effort.

Jordan B. Peterson

#37. Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.

William Lloyd Garrison