Top 100 Moral Virtue Quotes
#1. Our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding and behavior of large portions of the youth population in the United States today.
William Damon
#2. There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.
Tadeusz Borowski
#3. The life of theoretical philosophy is the best and happiest a man can lead. Few men are capable of it and then only intermittently. For the rest there is a second-best way of life, that of moral virtue and practical wisdom.
Aristotle.
#4. Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.
Aristotle.
#5. The amount of electricity that has been saved in spite of Vice President Cheney saying that efficiency is only a moral virtue ... and that you need increased supply like ANWR-is two ANWRs worth of energy.
Stephen Schneider
#6. Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale.
Roger Scruton
#7. Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#8. I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
Susan Sontag
#9. Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue.
Francis Bacon
#10. Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue.
Peter Boghossian
#11. You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
William Blake
#12. 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
#13. Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security.
Thomas Paine
#14. Prudence as well as Moral Virtue determines the complete performance of a man's proper function: Virtue ensures the rightness of the end we aim at, Prudence ensures the rightness of the means we adopt to gain that end.
Aristotle.
#15. The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain.
Helen Keller
#16. Man's work as Man is accomplished by virtue of Practical Wisdom and Moral Virtue, the latter giving the right aim and direction, the former the right means to its attainment;
Aristotle.
#17. Young man, can you restore my eyesight?" "Sir? Why, no, sir!" "You would find it much easier than to instill moral virtue - social responsibility - into a person who doesn't have it, doesn't want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him.
Robert A. Heinlein
#18. The door opens with a rusted jingle, and an animatronic Santa insults my moral virtue three times. Ho, ho, ho.
Kiersten White
#19. Moral virtue is a mean ... between two vices, one of excess and the other of defect; ... it is such a mean because it aims at hitting the middle point in feelings and in actions. This is why it is a hard task to be good, for it is hard to find the middle point in anything.
Aristotle.
#20. The connection between economics and the moral virtue of loving our neighbor is unmistakable to the observant.
Joe R Kesler
#21. She claims they give her moral virtue too, but then she has buckets more of that than she needs.
Gregory Maguire
#22. Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.
Thomas Aquinas
#23. Rightness in our choice of an end is secured by [Moral] Virtue;
Aristotle.
#24. We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.
Richard Flanagan
#25. Aristotle insists that habituation, not teaching, is the route to moral virtue (II. 1). We must practise doing good actions, not just read about virtue.
Aristotle.
#26. The system was elementary, as you can see. Naturally these "lotteries" failed. Their moral virtue was nil. They were not directed at all of man's faculties, but only at hope.
Jorge Luis Borges
#27. One of the most annoying habits of liberals is their tendency to confuse their political agenda with moral virtue.
Robert Stacy McCain
#28. Part of the answer to the question that life's roller-coaster ride repeatedly raises, why has this happened to me? is always: it is moral training and discipline, planned by my Heavenly Father to help me forward along the path of Chrislike virtue.
J.I. Packer
#29. The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.
Charles Caleb Colton
#30. [I]n speaking about someone's character, we do not say that he is wise or comprehending, but that he is gentle or moderate.
Aristotle.
#31. The morals of men are more governed by their pursuits than by their opinions. A type of virtue is first formed by circumstances, and men afterwards make it the model upon which their theories are framed.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#32. For Aristotle, it's not enough simply to act in accordance with the reason once in a while. We must cultivate habits of virtue that develop into a firmly established moral character over a lifetime.
John Mark Reynolds
#33. He who on earth has lived in the conjugal state as he should live, will be placed among the Gods who dwell in heaven
Thiruvalluvar
#34. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ayn Rand
#35. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.
Ayn Rand
#36. Freemasonry is an establishment founded on the benevolent intention of extending and conferring mutual happiness upon the best and truest principles of moral life and social virtue.
Andrew Jackson
#37. When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.
Peter Boghossian
#38. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.
Harold Rosenberg
#39. 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
#40. It is entirely possible that Limbaugh himself never needed contraception in college, but virtue in the absence of opportunity is hardly a moral triumph.
Kathleen Parker
#41. Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage.
William Slim
#42. Intelligence, like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring, from its application.
Roger Kimball
#43. The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. . . .
David McCullough
#44. There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
Henry Fielding
#45. It is as if a Mohammedan, while recognizing the divine mission of the Arab prophet, were to write for his son a treatise on the ethics of the New Testament as better adapted than the moral system of the Koran for the training and confirming of a young man in the practice of virtue.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#46. 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
#47. You've got to do some work now. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. Virtue is about moral excellence.
Francis Chan
#48. The exultation of poverty as a spiritual virtue is of the ego, not the spirit. A person acting from a motivation of contribution and service rises to such a level of moral authority that worldly success is a natural result.
Marianne Williamson
#49. If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...a value conferring status.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#50. To meet the serious issues facing us in our respective communities today, we must be examples of virtue and righteousness ourselves and choose today to take our stand on the moral issues which threaten us.
Nathan Eldon Tanner
#51. Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
Henry David Thoreau
#52. A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.
Susan Sontag
#53. Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#54. Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue.
Judith Martin
#55. It was [Totila's] constant theme, that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected; that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue; and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish.
Edward Gibbon
#56. There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
Erich Fromm
#57. Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness.
John Adams
#58. We often suffer from akrasia, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue.
Jonathan Sacks
#59. Guided by nothing but pop culture values, many children no longer learn how to think about morality and virtue, or to think of them at all. They grow up with no shared moral framework, believing that the highest values are diversity, tolerance and non-judgmentalism.
Gary Bauer
#60. Benjamin Franklin had a thirteen-week plan for moral perfection in which he practiced one virtue every week so as to turn it into a habit.
4 Hour Must Reads
#61. 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
#63. Everybody Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue and renders a man, in the pursuit or defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition, or contempt.
Samuel Griswold Goodrich
#64. So great is the effect of cleanliness upon man, that it extends even to his moral character. Virtue never dwelt long with filth; nor do I believe there ever was a person scrupulously: attentive to cleanliness, who was a consummate villain.
Benjamin Thompson
#65. It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable' ...
Thomas Henry Huxley
#66. We have next to consider the formal definition of virtue.
Aristotle.
#67. Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#68. Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue; and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them than through any other part of the fence.
Augustus William Hare
#69. Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.
Kenneth Minogue
#70. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu , virtue free of moral acid).
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. The challenge for people today
and it is not and easy one
is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.
Nathaniel Branden
#72. The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.
Rebecca Goldstein
#73. Leadership on virtue can never come from the major political actors; it will have to come from a movement of people, such as the people of a town who come together and agree to create moral coherence across the many areas of children's lives.
Jonathan Haidt
#74. In 'Reclaiming Virtue,' I argue that we have had an element missing in moral education. That element is 'affect.' Affect is simply the technical word for feeling or emotion.
John Bradshaw
#75. This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.
Ayn Rand
#76. Of how much importance is it, that the utmost pains be taken by the public to have the principles of virtue early inculcated on the minds even of children, and the moral sense kept alive.
Samuel Adams
#77. Selfishness is not a virtue. Altruism is not a moral weakness. Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.
Darryl Cunningham
#78. [Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
Ayn Rand
#79. [Women's] duty is nothing else than the fulfilment [sic] of the whole moral law, the attainment of every human virtue.
Frances Power Cobbe
#80. 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.
#81. All virtue lies in individual action, in inward energy, in self determination. There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd even toward the best objective.
William Ellery Channing
#82. The Romans rightly employed the same word (virtus) to designate courage, which is, in a physical sense, what the other is in a moral; the highest virtue of all being victory over ourselves.
Samuel Smiles
#83. In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
J.M. Coetzee
#84. Only a tiny percentage of people in the world care about moral theory in the sense I have been discussing, whereas 100 percent of the people in the world like stories. Most moral insights come from stories, but it is the special virtue of the philosopher to organize those insights
Anonymous
#85. The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#86. Evil is moral at it heart. The selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience.
Gregory Maguire
#87. Tolerance, a term which we sometimes use in place of the words respect, mercy, generosity, or forbearance, is the most essential element of moral systems; it is a very important source of spiritual discipline and a celestial virtue of perfected people.
Fethullah Gulen
#88. Moral maturity and freedom require more than mere adherence to the law; they require an understanding of the why and wherefore of its rules and regulations- the principles that make it worthy of their allegiance.
Karen Bohlin
#89. What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.
Aristotle.
#90. The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men ...
Baruch Spinoza
#91. Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges.
Hippolyte Taine
#92. Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?-Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#93. If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied.
Steven Pinker
#94. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
Ayn Rand
#95. But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life.
Daniel Bell
#96. The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.
David Hume
#97. Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.
Ayn Rand
#98. I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts.
William Benton Clulow
#99. The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.
John Ruskin
#100. Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge US-supplied bulldozers demolished his home with the family inside. Thanks to prevailing moral standards, such acts are also excluded from the canon of terrorism (or worse, war crimes), by virtue of wrong agency.3
Noam Chomsky
