Moralistic Quotes

#1. Evolution is amoral. Just because something is natural doesn't make it morally good ("the naturalistic fallacy"). Conversely, just because something is morally desirable doesn't make it true ("the moralistic fallacy").

John Durant

#2. For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

Junot Diaz

#3. The most common motives for homicide are moralistic: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel, punishing an unfaithful or deserting romantic partner, and other acts of jealousy, revenge, and self-defense.

Steven Pinker

#4. Our generals talk a good game about taking care of their grunts, and the majority of our Beltway politicians bay with moralistic fervor about how they, too, support the troops.

David Hackworth

#5. We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.

Kate Millett

#6. Moralistic, therapeutic deism is fine with sin hiding in a foxhole. The gospel wants to nuke the hole.

Matt Chandler

#7. Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic.

Michel Faber

#8. The gods of hunter-gatherers are often capricious and malevolent. They sometimes punish bad behavior, but they bring suffering to the virtuous as well. As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, however, their gods become far more moralistic.

Jonathan Haidt

#9. Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and then projected upon the distant screen of prehistory, rationalizing the present while obscuring the past. Yabba dabba doo.

Cacilda Jetha

#10. I don't believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so called civilized-society

Richard Ramirez

#11. Regardless of the official theology held on paper, moralistic preaching (the bane of conservatives and liberals alike) assumes that we are not really helpless sinners who need to be rescued but decent folks who need good examples, exhortations, and instructions.

Michael S. Horton

#12. Your humble critic confesses that he has been wrestling with 'weight issues' since leaving college lo these, uh, several years ago, so it's hard to be receptive to the moralistic scolding and patronizing encouragement offered endlessly by the allegedly well-meaning.

Tom Shales

#13. Education is one of the most beautiful and liberating things we can pursue in our lives, but too often it is approached as a restrictive, punitive, linear, and moralistic act.

Jonathan Mooney

#14. One thing I'm not is a moralistic filmmaker. I'm not trying to tell people what to do, and I'm not trying to lead.

Mary Harron

#15. Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

Susan Sontag

#16. I don't think that my work is very moralistic - at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don't think visual work operates like that.

Kara Walker

#17. If things are better for women there, it is due to a profound and enduring social consensus that life should be made livable based on who they are and not on an abstract moralistic notion of how they ought to be.

Judith Warner

#18. Richness not merely means our bank accounts. Let Richness be in our talks, in our walks of life, in our moralistic and conscience oriented life.

Rajasaraswathii

#19. All moralistic judgments, whether positive or negative, are tragic expressions of unmet needs.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#20. So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces (139).

Maggie Nelson

#21. Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

Iris Murdoch

#22. When we make mistakes, we can use the process of NVC mourning and self-forgiveness to show us where we can grow instead of getting caught up in moralistic self-judgments.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#23. The interesting thing about Sherlock is that he is himself a reflection of that very English duality. As a drug addict, he is a criminal. But he is also a crime fighter. That makes him an extremely potent character to personify the hypocrisy of a culture that is both moralistic and corrupt.

Rupert Everett

#24. What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about - anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.

Richard Rohr

#25. I try to have thick skin, but every once in a while I read something that someone says about me, and it's so slanderous and moralistic and it has nothing to do with my music.

Madonna Ciccone

#26. On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.

Kathy Acker

#27. More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

Jerry Saltz

#28. There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.

Bayard Rustin

#29. The trouble with this country," he said, "is that the women have no guts.They'd rather slink off and have a dangerous, illegal operation performed than change the laws. The legislators are all men, and men don't bear babies; they can afford to be moralistic.

Michael Crichton

#30. [Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.

Madame De Stael

#31. American Progressivism - the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent - is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.

Jonah Goldberg

#32. People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan.

J.G. Ballard

#33. My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic carpets and wondrous lands. My mother is not religious - she's just English.

Bat For Lashes

#34. The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil.

Hans Morgenthau

#35. I worry sometimes that I'm a bit moralistic; always writing about men who are learning to grow up, not be so self-absorbed, selfish or badly behaved. I wonder if that's dull and liberal and wimpy? I should probably write something that celebrates wickedness.

David Nicholls

#36. I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

Steven Pinker

#37. Sometimes I cannot say much about why I go to church other than what people who go to the gym say: I always feel better once I'm there; I feel better after; it is always good for me, not good in a take-your-vitamins way, in a chidingly moralistic way, but in a palpable way.

Lauren F. Winner