Moral Progress Quotes

#1. I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.

Alexander McCall Smith

#2. Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.

Sam Harris

#3. Without moral progress, stimulated by faith in God, immorality in all its forms will proliferate and strangle goodness and human decency. Mankind will not be able to fully express the potential nobility of the human soul unless faith in God is strengthened.

James E. Faust

#4. My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

George Eliot

#5. History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.

Gerald R. Ford

#6. That was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world - not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.

Sam Harris

#7. Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

Bertrand Russell

#8. You can tell a lot about the intellectual and moral progress of a nation's citizens, by the quality and nature of the films they watch.

Abhijit Naskar

#9. If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding.

Rebecca Goldstein

#10. A great gulf, however, has been opened between man's material advance and his social and moral progress, a gulf in which he may one day be lost if it is not closed or narrowed.

Lester B. Pearson

#11. There is nothing - not any religious or secular body of work - that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.

Dennis Prager

#12. Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

Madame De Stael

#13. Man's material discoveries have outpaced his moral progress.

Clement Attlee

#14. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Bertrand Russell

#15. The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals. - MAHATMA GANDHI

Jay Kopelman

#16. Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#17. Moral progress is a process of isolation; the mountain tops are lonely.

Austin O'Malley

#18. Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

Immanuel Kant

#19. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

Sam Harris

#20. In support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. 3

Steven Pinker

#21. He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray

Immanuel Kant

#22. One can measure the greatness and the moral progress of a nation by looking at how it treats its animals.

Mahatma Gandhi

#23. Racial injustice around the world. Poverty. War. When man solves these three great problems he will have squared his moral progress with his scientific progress. And, more importantly, he will have learned the practical art of living in harmony.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#24. Every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions.

John B. S. Haldane

#25. Material advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year has its applications to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

Thomas Huxley

#26. Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#27. Today we are putting our hopes in materialism, in technological progress, and in freedom from moral absolutes. They have all failed. They've failed because they've been powerless to change the human heart. What is the answer? There is hope, if we will turn to God.

Billy Graham

#28. Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit.

Howard Mumford Jones

#29. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

H.L. Mencken

#30. I know how irritating it is to have somebody else lay down rules for your moral uplift, but you've got to stand a great deal in order to make progress ...

William Howard Taft

#31. We're moving towards such a strange time.A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress

Michel Faber

#32. Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.

Bertrand Russell

#33. ... The moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions ... No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul.

Winston S. Churchill

#34. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#35. DEGRADATION, n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment.

Ambrose Bierce

#36. The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.

Nancy Gibbs

#37. But in addition to all the moral evidence against the Bible, I will, in the progress of this work, produce such other evidence as even a priest cannot deny; and show, from that evidence, that the Bible is not entitled to credit, as being the word of God.

Thomas Paine

#38. We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

Richard Flanagan

#39. The perfecting of one's self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development.

Confucius

#40. As civilization progresses, we should improve our laws basically, not superficially. Many things that are lawful are highly immoral and some things which are moral are unlawful.

Henry Latham Doherty

#41. Self-discover is not as someone would have us think, a heavy, awesome, moral process where everyone sits around and frowns. As you progress towards enlightenment, you become funny.

Frederick Lenz

#42. As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress ofthe character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#43. There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.

Charles Baudelaire

#44. As we consider the fast pace of scientific and technological progress in our modern world, we must not lose our moral compass and give way to 'free market eugenics'.

Sam Brownback

#45. 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

#46. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.

John Gray

#47. A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

John Stuart Mill

#48. The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.

Robert A. Nisbet

#49. Moral excellence is the bright consummate flower of all progress.

Charles Sumner

#50. 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

#51. No matter how advanced its progress, any generation that neglects its spiritual and moral life is going to disintegrate.

Billy Graham

#52. [Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

Julian Barnes

#53. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous.

G.K. Chesterton

#54. This is what evolution means
ordered progress; development from poorer to richer, from lower to higher, from less to greater
progress. In the material universe, progress to higher forms; in the moral universe, progress to higher life.

Lyman Abbott

#55. Pranayam is the right science of breathing where deep, regulated and rhythmic breathing is done along with mental purification. Its practice plays an important role not only in cure of physical ailments, but also for moral and spiritual progress.

Virchand Gandhi

#56. 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

#57. One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

Robert M. Pirsig

#58. The belief that ignites hope in the heart of a person to survive is the same belief that boosts the ego of the person and deters his progress by clouding his judgments.

Adhish Mazumder