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. 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.
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Ordinary human laws are the means
however imperfect
by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.
John Le Carre
#14. Just as rust produced by iron corrodes iron, so is the violator of moral law destroyed by his own wrong action.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#15. 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
#16. The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.
Paul Ricoeur
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
Alan Watts
#23. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Ayn Rand
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
#27. 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
#28. 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.
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. The justice of any single commandment cannot be proven logically in an irrefutable manner, and there is no moral law which is binding under all conditions without exception. Ethics, generally, exist only as far as we are willing to accept them.
(from 'The Specter of Alexander Wolf')
Gaito Gazdanov
#34. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
William James
#35. The will to set values and the power to make them law are jointly at the bottom of all operative norms. When linked to divine wisdom, this source of moral law is still in safe hands which man can trust.
Hans Jonas
#36. There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.
C.S. Lewis
#37. The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil iteself.
Ravi Zacharias
#38. To put it simply, when you assert that there is such a thing as evil, you must assume there is such a thing as good. When you say there is such a thing as good, you must assume there is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil.
Frank Turek
#39. One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
C.S. Lewis
#40. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.
Thomas Jefferson
#41. The obligation of human beings to support and obey human governments, while they legislate upon the principles of the moral law, is an unalterable as the moral law itself.
Charles Grandison Finney
#42. Whenever you try to break God's moral law, you end up breaking yourself and hurting others - all while proving His law in the process.
Ravi Zacharias
#43. The moral law of God is the only law of individuals and of nations, and nothing can be rightful government but such as is established and administered with a view to its support.
Charles Grandison Finney
#44. 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
#45. [Women's] duty is nothing else than the fulfilment [sic] of the whole moral law, the attainment of every human virtue.
Frances Power Cobbe
#46. The Moral Law is summarily contained in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments; written by the finger of God on two tablets of stone, and delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Noah Webster
#47. 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
#48. We look upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose-the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#49. A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.
Joan D. Chittister
#50. The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.
Ayn Rand
#51. Put plainly, there is a natural moral law, existing in reality, i.e., not invented by man, which transcends and trumps our desires. Something is right or wrong, whether we like it or not.
William Shakespeare
#52. There is a moral law in this world which has its application both to individuals and organized bodies of men. You cannot go on violating these laws in the name of your nation, yet enjoy their advantage as individuals. We may forget truth for our conv
Rabindranath Tagore
#53. The consummate leader cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is in his power to control success.
Sun Tzu
#54. 5,6. The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.
Sun Tzu
#55. People of the West have various forms of democracy based on a belief in God as well as on a general acceptance of moral law. However, in practice we are beginning to resemble the Marxists, who have little respect for moral law or religion.
Billy Graham
#56. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
C.S. Lewis
#57. It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.
J. Budziszewski
#58. Moses simplifies the whole duty of Israel (and of humanity) by crystalizing the moral law into a single command to love God supremely.
Max Anders
#59. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
C.S. Lewis
#60. Not everybody wants to call sin 'sin'! Some call it mischief. Some call it rebellion. And hardly anybody can agree where we should draw the line ... Our courts are ... trying to define pornography, yet moral law is very specific to any reader of God's Word.
Paul Harvey
#61. Mankind is one, seeing that all are equally subject to the moral law. All men are equal in God's eyes.
Mahatma Gandhi
#62. Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
Immanuel Kant
#63. There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#64. 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
#65. The theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn't a physical law like F=MA. It's a moral law, like 'Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.'
Nick Hanauer
#66. No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law.
Pope Paul VI
#67. If on a sinking ship out at sea, the moral law is to always help save women & children first ... Why can't we apply the same morals here in our nation?
Timothy Pina
#68. If you have a moral law then you must have a moral law giver. You don't get a moral law unless there's a moral law giver.
Frank Turek
#69. Music is moral law. It is the essence of order and leads to all that is good, true and beautiful.
Plato
#70. Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.
Arthur Balfour
#71. A nation, as an individual, has duties to fulfill appointed by God and His moral law.
Benjamin Disraeli
#72. Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
#73. Conscience is a vigilant eye before which each imagination, thought, and act is held up for either censure or approval ... There is no greater proof of the existence of a moral law and Lawgiver in the universe than this little light of the soul. It is God's voice to the inner man.
Billy Graham
#74. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.
Martin Luther
#75. Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law ...
Augustus William Hare
#76. My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.
Jacques Lacan
#77. These are: (1) the Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) the Commander; (5) method and discipline.
Sun Tzu
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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.
#83. All so-called moral interest consists simply in respect for the law.
Immanuel Kant
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
Mark Steyn
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
James G. Frazer
#94. 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
#95. It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.
Murray Rothbard
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
