Moral Principle Quotes

#1. The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?

Sam Harris

#2. Cooperation is a higher moral principle than competition.

Bryant McGill

#3. Non-cooperation in military matters should be an essential moral principle for all true scientists ...

Albert Einstein

#4. We may make mistakes-but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#5. America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle," he said. "We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

George W. Bush

#6. That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.

Irvine Welsh

#7. Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

Steven Pinker

#8. The difficulty was not that of following a moral principle at personal cost; the difficulty was that of knowing what to do when there is more than one principal, and when the principles clash.

Elton Trueblood

#9. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.

Nelson Mandela

#10. Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love, and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.

William Ellery Channing

#11. Sound moral principle is the only sure evidence of strength, the only firm foundation of greatness and perpetuity. Where this is lacking, no man's character is strong; no nation's life can be lasting.

Orson F. Whitney

#12. Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

Dalai Lama

#13. Discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good

Benjamin Franklin

#14. A moral principle in genetic testing is that it should always be done with the consent of the individual. No one wants someone snooping into his DNA.

Arthur Caplan

#15. It is difficult for me to regard anyone who obeys no moral principle in his conduct to be a religious man.

Mahatma Gandhi

#16. By ethical argument and moral principle the greatest crimes are eventually shown to have been necessary, and, in fact, a signal benefit to mankind.

Zhuangzi

#17. 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

#18. A man that puts himself on the ground of moral principle, if the whole world be against him, is mightier than all of them.

Henry Ward Beecher

#19. Before we're Americans, we're Christians. And so we have to be informed by a certain moral sense, which means that we need to speak up for moral principle and for gospel principle regardless of who that offends.

Russell D. Moore

#20. Moral principle is the foundation of law.

Ronald Dworkin

#21. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

John Quincy Adams

#22. For every moral principle, there's an equal and opposite government program

Erne Lewis

#23. As the light of morning strikes now one peak and then another, some being illuminated while others are in the shadow, so the light of the essential moral principle shines now upon one duty and then upon another, while others are in the shadow.

Felix Adler

#24. Moral principle is a looser bond than pecuniary interest.

Abraham Lincoln

#25. What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.

William Hazlitt

#26. When a heroine is satisfied that she has exercised judgement with clear vision, moral principle,and common sense, she need not acquiesce to opposing viewpoints.

Jane Austen

#27. There are no "standards of Right". Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing.

Aleister Crowley

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. One of the marvelous blessings of the Book of Mormon is that it contains, in clarity, revelations reserved to come forth in this dispensation of time. Much of the knowledge that we have relating to the principle of moral agency is found in these modern revelations.

L. Lionel Kendrick

#31. A great principle of moral advancement, on par with "Love thy neighbor" and "All men are created equal," is the one on the bumper sticker: "Shit happens.

Steven Pinker

#32. One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.

Ayn Rand

#33. The moral decisions of others should be treated with respect, as long as such decisions do not conflict with the principle of tolerance.

Karl Popper

#34. The first principle from which stems the moral of about all people at all time; it is summarized in this precept: Love thy neighbour as thyself, and: do as you would be done by.

African Spir

#35. Virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

Aristotle.

#36. Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.

Russell Kirk

#37. I would never say, to justify a lapse in principle, "I am only human"
as though that were some kind of justification for weakness, moral weakness. Flesh and blood is much, much stronger than fools believe.

Jack Henry Abbott

#38. Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

Erving Goffman

#39. The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.

Noam Chomsky

#40. I class the principle of moral feeling under that of happiness, because every empirical interest promises to contribute to our well-being by the agreeableness that a thing affords, whether profit be regarded.

Immanuel Kant

#41. Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.

Gary L. Francione

#42. We are accountable for our actions as we exercise our moral agency. If we understand this principle and make righteous choices, our lives will be blessed.

L. Lionel Kendrick

#43. Private Manning is the world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to 'a moral choice.' His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.

John Pilger

#44. The Principles Of The Kingdom Of God Are Sealed Are Sealed Into Your Moral Awareness

Sunday Adelaja

#45. What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.

Henry David Thoreau

#46. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

Matthew Desmond

#47. Exceptionalism" - the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations - was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics.

Stephen Kinzer

#48. No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.

Jeffrey Tucker

#49. 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

#50. The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. (from "Rediscovering Lost Values")

Martin Luther King Jr.

#51. 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

#52. As a broad generalization, big businesses have no moral objections to being whores. Getting into bed with Uncle Sam is all a question of price, not principle.

Jonah Goldberg

#53. What stirs God most is not physical suffering but sin. All too often we are more afraid of physical pain than of moral wrong. The cross is the standing evidence of the fact that holiness is a principle for which God would die.

Billy Graham

#54. If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

Abraham Lincoln

#55. The declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children is contrary to every principle of moral justice.

Thomas Paine

#56. If we are not inwardly wrought upon, and changed by the powerful operations of the Holy Spirit, and our moral actions proceed from a principle of a new nature, however we may call ourselves Christians, we shall be found naked at the great day.

George Whitefield

#57. Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

Renata Adler

#58. I do not think it possible for anyone to get by in life without prejudice. However, the attempt to do so leads many people to suppose that, in order to decide any moral question, they have to find an indubitable first principle from which they can deduce an answer.

Theodore Dalrymple

#59. Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty which is the basis, the principle, and the unity of the beautiful.

Friedrich Schiller

#60. 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

#61. The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening.

Noam Chomsky

#62. The goal of parenting is to create self-sufficient virtues in children. Applying external pressure and punishments tends to teach them fear-based compliance rather than the internalization of moral standards.

Stefan Molyneux

#63. Every principle that wants to command strong allegiance must make a moral case. Men want to feel that what they are doing is useful, but they want also, and mainly, to feel that it is right. Freedom is one of these principles

Henry Wallich