Top 100 Moral Law Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I highly venerate the Masonic Institution, under the fullest persuasion that, when its principles are acknowledged and its laws and precepts obeyed, it comes nearest to the Christian religion, in its moral effects and influence, of any institution with which I am acquainted.
Theodore Roosevelt
#3. There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws ... What is the difference between the two? ... An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#4. Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law ... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike ... Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
C.S. Lewis
#6. To deny the existence of a God and more specifically the Creator God of Christianity is not based upon a philosophical issue, but rather a moral one.
R. Alan Woods
#7. First, where the law is the major source for bioethics, morality is too easily confused with legality and moral questions too quickly reduced to legal questions. Moreover, the law is better at
telling us what not to do than at providing ends and goals worthy of our humanity.
Allen Verhey
#8. He proceeded on the theory that confinement within the walls of the prison was punishment. That the law never intended to confine prisoners within the prison. From a moral point of view, it was putting the prisoner in double jeopardy. Actually it was a double punishment.
Lewis E. Lawes
#9. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#10. All so-called moral interest consists simply in respect for the law.
Immanuel Kant
#11. Ordinary human laws are the means
however imperfect
by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
#12. The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#13. It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power
it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
C.S. Lewis
#14. When Friedrich Nietzsche mocked Immanuel Kant for having "discovered a moral faculty in man", he inadvertently resolved Kant's dilemma of being unable to identify what exactly constituted his "moral law" for fear of offending against a charge of empiricism from the likes of David Hume.
Joseph B.H. McMillan
#15. Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
Plato
#16. However, the outcome is inconsistent with the general principle that people should not be punished in the absence of culpability, since one who acts on the basis of a reasonable mistake of law lacks moral blameworthiness.
Joshua Dressler
#17. The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
Mark Steyn
#18. Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept.
Robert Bork
#19. Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern.
Lyman Abbott
#21. I am fat and flabby and that Dr. J. I. Packer is right when he says, "Here then is the root cause of our moral flabbiness; we have neglected God's Law."3
Alistair Begg
#22. A law is something which must have a moral basis, so that there is an inner compelling force for every citizen to obey.
Chaim Weizmann
#23. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
James G. Frazer
#25. The moral laws of the Universe are deeply embedded in the constitution of things. We do not break them - we break ourselves upon them.
E. Stanley Jones
#26. It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.
Murray Rothbard
#27. Until ... the promiscuous woman is recognized, not only in law but in public opinion, as being neither better nor worse than the promiscuous man, equality has not been won in the moral sphere.
Alison Roberta Noble Neilans
#28. There may be a legal obligation to obey, but there will be no moral obligation to obey. When it comes to history, it will be the people who broke the law for freedom who will be remembered and honoured.
Tony Benn
#29. No government is lawful or innocent that does not recognize the moral law as the only universal law, and God as the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge, to whom nations in their national capacity, as well as individuals, are amenable.
Charles Grandison Finney
#30. If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.
John Lancaster Spalding
#31. When a man is guided by the principles of reciprocity and consciousness, he is not far from the moral law. Whatever you don't wish for yourself don't do unto others.
Confucius
#32. I would say that without any doubt he's the killer - the law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty which I - there's no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.
Henry Wade
#33. It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#34. Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather then relative terms.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#35. When people were conscious of a God whose character was moral law, when their consciences were informed by a sense of rightness, their watchmen would shout halt when they trespassed the law. Now their watchmen are silent. They serve no king and protect no kingdom.
James W. Sire
#36. National character cannot be built by law. It is the sum of the moral fiber of its individuals.
Herbert Hoover
#37. The Codex is our moral code. No one is higher than the law. Those who break the law must be broken.
Damian Wampler
#38. Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.
George Bancroft
#39. The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.
Edgar Quinet
#40. The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code; it contained many statutes ... of universal application-laws essential to the existence of men in society, and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws.
John Quincy Adams
#41. Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.
John Le Carre
#42. The people have realized that Martial Law is not law. A regime not established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
#43. Just as rust produced by iron corrodes iron, so is the violator of moral law destroyed by his own wrong action.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#44. 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
#45. Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself
Carl Jung
#46. Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the social and the moral.
Catharine Beecher
#47. The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.
Paul Ricoeur
#49. It is a sad day for our country when the moral foundation of our law and the acknowledgment of God has to be hidden from public view to appease a federal judge.
Soledad O'Brien
#50. Is it less dishonest to do what is wrong because it is not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy.
Thomas Jefferson
#51. The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality.
Peter Akinola
#52. When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.
Emile Durkheim
#53. We know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey.
C.S. Lewis
#54. Every doer of the law and every moral worker is accursed, for he walketh in the presumption of his own righteousness.
Martin Luther
#56. That part of the judicial law which
was typical of Christ's government
has ceased, but that part which is of
common and general equity remains
still in force. It is a common maxim:
those judgments which are common
and natural are moral and perpetual.
Samuel Bolton
#57. Laws that require equal protections reinforce the moral imperative of equality.
Hillary Clinton
#58. It is plain that there is one moral law for heaven and another for the earth. The pulpit assures us that wherever we see suffering and sorrow, which we can relieve and do not, we sin, heavily. There was never yet a case of suffering or sorrow which God could not relieve. Does He sin then?
Mark Twain
#59. As for the law of moral causation ('karma'): this is human justice dressed up as cosmic justice and then imputed to the impersonal workings of the natural world.
Stephen Batchelor
#60. Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager-Telushkin view: It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world ... The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven.
George Gilder
#61. You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.
Ravi Zacharias
#62. I would hope that we can load our moral computers with three elements of integrity: 1. Dealing justly with oneself. 2. Dealing justly with others. 3. Recognizing the law of the harvest.
James E. Faust
#63. Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
Alan Watts
#64. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Ayn Rand
#65. Buddha emphasized and re-declared the eternal and unalterable existence of the moral government of this universe. He unhesitatingly said that the law was God Himself.
Mahatma Gandhi
#66. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.
C.S. Lewis
#67. Stargazing is one of the most profoundly human things one can do. But perhaps we must more frequently tear ourselves away from the mystery and beauty of the starry heavens above, and rather inspect, admire and foster the moral law within.
Jack Gleeson
#68. One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#69. Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
#70. All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. Dworkin, for example, argues that our law includes not only norms found in treaties, customs, constitutions, statutes, and cases, but also moral principles that provide the best justification for the norms found there.5 On his account the things justified by moral
H. L. A. Hart
#72. There are surely times when a conservative and a liberal would agree. We would agree on how moral it is to discriminate on the basis of race. There's absolutely no light between those two positions. It becomes a little more complex when you talk about law as opposed to morality.
Dennis Prager
#73. It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
Thomas Jefferson
#74. The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction ... the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.
Leo Tolstoy
#75. Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
Thomas Sowell
#76. War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with ... But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation, and, as such, an dispensable factor in civilization.
Friedrich Von Bernhardi
#77. The egoist ... destroys the universal importance accorded to moral law by showing that life independent of it is possible. Secondly, and even more intolerably to the pious, he manages to do so with shameless enjoyment.
John Carroll
#78. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realization of a political ideal; it is the discharge of a moral obligation.
Lord Acton
#79. Italians tend to be less rigidly moral and law-abiding than do Anglo-Saxons. They also have a profound suspicion of the state and most of its agencies.
Donna Leon
#80. The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the due process clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.
Byron White
#82. Our world hinges on moral foundations. God has made it so. God has made the universe to be based on a moral law. So long as man disobeys it he is revolting against God. That's what we need in the world today: people who will stand for right and goodness.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#83. The great laws of the moral world do not vary, however different, under different dispensations, may be the authoritative enunciation of truth, or the means of propagating and defending it.
Henry Parry Liddon
#84. No matter what theory of the origin of government you adopt, if you follow it out to its legitimate conclusions it will bring you face to face with the moral law.
Henry Van Dyke
#85. Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires, which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments, that will over-balance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the breach of the law.
John Locke
#86. Thus moral theology leads us four steps deeper than law. To fulfill the moral law, we need love. To get love, we need union with God. To get union with God, we need the new birth. And to get the new birth, we need faith.
Peter Kreeft
#87. Moral education, as I understand it, is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue, it is rather about finding within us an ever-increasing sense of the worth of creation. It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.
Andrew Linzey
#88. The proper direction of man's thought is not toward the creation of new laws for government, but toward the acceptance of every person's moral dignity.
Edmund Yates
#89. There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.
Joseph Conrad
#90. What Americans don't want to admit ... is that not only is there not a contradiction between state regulation and freedom, but in order for us to actually be free in our social interactions, there must be an extremely elaborated network of health, law, institutions, moral rules and so on.
Slavoj Zizek
#91. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
Michael Pollan
#92. Since lawyers are thinkers and not feelers, and their moral development is locked into the rigidity of maintaining law and order, they often come across as impersonal, insensitive, amoral, and not particularly human to the clients they serve.
Thane Rosenbaum
#93. That even under the gospel of peace and reconciliation by Christ (of which the intercession of Moses was typical) the moral law should continue to bind believers.
Matthew Henry
#94. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at shorter distances, the senses are despotic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#95. All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.
Mark Twain
#96. Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.
Hermann Von Helmholtz
#97. We have only got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam.
C.S. Lewis
#98. Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.
Thurgood Marshall
#99. As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical, and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both.
James McCosh
#100. It is unreasonable [for a father] to expect moral success with [his] children without submitting to the laws of morality.
Larry Christenson
