Top 100 Morality As Quotes
#1. There is only one morality, as there is only one geometry.
Voltaire
#2. Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand
#3. Education must have two foundations
morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
Nicolas Chamfort
#4. Action is the only reality; not only reality, but morality as well.
Abbie Hoffman
#5. My commitment to the security and future of Israel is based upon basic morality as well as enlightened self-interest. Our role in supporting Israel honors our own heritage.
Gerald R. Ford
#6. What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality - as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
Hannah Arendt
#7. Myth safeguards and enforces morality, as Malinowski proclaimed, and if there are no myths there will be no morality.
Rollo May
#9. Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of the human condition. No, they proclaimed morality as an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable.
Steven Erikson
#10. A careful regulation of the economic impulses of society was considered as essential to man's spiritual welfare as it was to his material well-being. There was a righteous price in commerce, based on considerations of morality, as well as an economic price, reflecting the laws of supply and demand.
Lacey Baldwin Smith
#11. Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
George Bernard Shaw
#12. I would define morality as enlightened self-interest ... That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just isn't where we are.
Andrew Young
#13. Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#14. Worship is the highest moral act a human can perform, so the only basis and motivation for it that many people can conceive is the notion of morality as the disinterested performance of duty. But when worship is reduced to disinterested duty, it ceases to be worship. For worship is a feast.
John Piper
#15. The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.
Sam Harris
#16. Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.
Philip Rieff
#17. I don't apologize for my behavior anymore. Whatever I do or don't do shouldn't matter. Moral certainty is dangerous. Moral certainty is what makes people go to war unnecessarily and illegally. Morality, as any halfway intelligent human being would tell you, is a very subjective thing.
Steve Coogan
#18. Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.
Herbert Read
#19. All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#20. There is in the clergy of all Christian denominations a time-serving, cringing, subservient morality, as wide from the spirit of the gospel as it is from the intrepid assertion and vindication of truth.
John Quincy Adams
#21. Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
Sigmund Freud
#23. [Liberty] considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#24. We need to teach our people to speak what is right as the highest manifestation of morality
Sunday Adelaja
#25. Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.
Barry Unsworth
#26. Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be.
G. E. M. Anscombe
#27. The entire morality of the world could be summarized in the words, do as others do.
Multatuli
#28. Our goals can only be achieved with a society that respects and equally protects the rights of every human being, old and young, rich and poor, regardless of gender, color, race, or creed. We must reject the initiation of violence by individuals or government as morally repugnant.
Ron Paul
#29. Thus old men are honoured with a particular respect, yet all the rest fare as well as they. Both dinner and supper are begun with some lecture of morality that is read to them; but it is so short that it is not tedious nor uneasy to them to hear it.
Thomas More
#30. The common people do not judge of vice or virtue by morality or immorality, so much as by the stamp that is set upon it by men of figure.
Roger L'Estrange
#31. A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.
Ayn Rand
#32. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." The question is: where is the line?
Dan Ariely
#33. Socrates: I'm afraid that it might actually be sacrilegious to stand idly by while morality is being denigrated and not try to assist as long as one has breath in one's body and a voice to protest with.
Plato
#34. We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.
Pythagoras
#35. The entire stock of relationships which suited in war - militiae - was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace - domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
#36. This, of course, is the big dance of capitalism: how to keep morality from gumming up the gears of profit, how to convince people to make bad decisions without seeing them as bad.
Steve Almond
#37. Treat others as thou wouldst be treated. What thou likest not for thyself, dispense not to others.
Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
#38. Just as altruism tells an individual that however much he is sacrificing, his duty is to sacrifice more, the Progressives concluded that however much Americans were giving, morality required them to give more.
Yaron Brook
#39. As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.
Roger Penrose
#40. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
Steven D. Levitt
#41. I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.
Anthony Burgess
#42. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable ...
George Orwell
#43. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality
John Stuart Mill
#44. At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#45. An impostor would not have the same value as the original person in society.
Saaif Alam
#46. While some of them acknowledge the obligation of natural morality in their mode of conducting their cases, and preserve their individual character as gentlemen, there are others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland.
George Combe
#47. A Man's sense of Morality tends to decrease as his Power increases,
Diana Gabaldon
#48. As an immigrant, I appreciate, far more than the average American, the liberties we have in this country. Silence is a big enemy of morality. I don't want our blunders in history to get repeated.
Gloria Estefan
#49. There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
Oscar Wilde
#50. A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
Thomas Jefferson
#51. Our errors and our controversies, in the sphere of morality, arise sometimes from looking on men as though they could be altogether bad, or altogether good.
Luc De Clapiers
#53. So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.
Huston Smith
#54. We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.
Thomas Carlyle
#55. Morality often manifests itself as cruelty, So be very kind before you are moral.
Debasish Mridha
#56. What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?
Nenia Campbell
#57. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.
Saul D. Alinsky
#58. Money is the measure of morality, and the success or failure of slavery as a money-making system, determines with many whether ... it should be maintained or abolished.
Frederick Douglass
#59. This is the antinomy: insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#60. You're damn right we need a rational code of morality and ethics. But not much progress can be made in that direction while we've still got a majority ranting about gods, devils, souls, and absolute morality, and using an ancient book written by ignorant nomads as a guide.
Doug Graham
#61. We say to the British government: you have kept those sculptures for almost two centuries. You have cared for them as well as you could, for which we thank you. But now in the name of fairness and morality, please give them back.
Melina Mercouri
#62. Ideals and morality are often spoken of as virtual antimatter to the behaviors allegedly needed to maximize profits.
Stephen Young
#63. A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts.
Pauline Kael
#64. I think that as human beings we tend to compartmentalize, and we have a selective morality based on the situation we're in.
Richard Gere
#65. Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.
Bell Hooks
#66. The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
John Stuart Mill
#67. America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance - it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.
Fulton J. Sheen
#68. Fake sympathy is the politicians demanding more cash as they ignore the underlying crisis. They prefer money over morality.
Greg Gutfeld
#70. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.
Charles Dickens
#71. To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
Simone Weil
#72. Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.
Aleister Crowley
#73. The value of art, in Strict Father morality, lies either in its moral value, its entertainment value, its economic value, or its value as a success symbol - a sign of belonging to an elite. All
George Lakoff
#74. The first step in wisdom, as well as in morality, is to open the windows of the ego as wide as possible.
Bertrand Russell
#75. Over time, I realized I wasn't necessarily seeing people or things at their best or worst; instead, I was simply seeing things as they were.
There didn't seem to be a moral high road to take in most situations, and "What's the right thing to do?" wasn't an easy question.
Dee Williams
#76. There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter Lippmann
#77. Modern societies march towards morality in proportion as they leave religion behind.
Paul Bert
#78. The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural sexual gratification.
Wilhelm Reich
#79. Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
#80. According to Jains the soul in pure form has infiniteness in terms of its knowledge and power. These faculties are obstructed for its exhibition due to Karmic bondage. As the soul progresses in its morality and spirituality it gets certain powers which may look miraculous.
Virchand Gandhi
#81. Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
Gustave Flaubert
#82. Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
Aldous Huxley
#83. You must always focus on and pursue the good, but when that darkness surges up from within, you need to know how to handle it, use it, and release it wisely, not just deny its presence or acceptability as you suppress it within you.
A.J. Darkholme
#84. Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.
Steven Pinker
#85. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.
Ayn Rand
#86. To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.
John Locke
#87. Only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgement can be regarded as moral, pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality.
Ayn Rand
#88. Morality and freedom are as certainly the only bases of the happiness and dignity of the human race as the system of Galileo is the true theory of the celestial motions.
Germaine De Stael
#89. All decisions we've come to accept as right or wrong are ingrained in us from the society in which we abide. Rights and wrongs are not universally known or transferable.
John-Talmage Mathis
#90. If you say there is no such thing as morality in absolute terms, then child abuse is not evil, it just may not happen to be your thing.
Rebecca Manley Pippert
#91. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.
Thomas Merton
#92. The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#93. It's a morality film, and it poses the question 'What would you do?' I took it very seriously, just as the director did in terms of atmosphere and lighting, and I was just trying to help that vision along.
Kevin Williamson
#94. Across the board ... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right?
Hunter S. Thompson
#95. There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity.
Nenia Campbell
#96. Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.
Jane Rule
#97. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
Sam Harris
#98. But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
Milan Kundera
#99. The pure and noble, the graceful and dignified, simplicity of language is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scriptures and Homer. The whole book of Job, with regard both to sublimity of thought and morality, exceeds, beyond all comparison, the most noble parts of Homer.
Alexander Pope
#100. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS, - that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.
Friedrich Nietzsche
