Top 100 Morality Is Not Quotes
#2. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.
Brian Dennehy
#4. Truth must be integrated with love; morality is not whole without it. Love is the greatest strength of the powerless. Unity founded on love will never be coercion; power guided by love will never be violence. Love is all-powerful and will even overcome hatred. And only love can do this!
Vaclav Havel
#6. Morality is not the purpose of life; life is the purpose of morality.
Warren Fahy
#7. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.
Steven Pinker
#9. Morality is not man's prison but rather the divine element in him.
Pope Benedict XVI
#10. To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
Joseph Addison
#11. Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.
Penn Jillette
#12. Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
Barbara Kingsolver
#13. Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#14. Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.
J. Budziszewski
#15. Morality is not defined and cannot be defined by individual choice.
Rush Limbaugh
#16. Morality is not a one not song. It's a harmony of obligations to man and God.
Andrew Klavan
#17. Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.
Derek Jarman
#18. Morality is not a simple set of rules. It's a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patters evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.
Robert M. Pirsig
#19. Where is the absolution of religion now? Morality is not negotiable, Hensley. Unleashing a war machine in order to end a war? An absurd Olympics of semantic excuses. Ludicrous.
Hazel Woods
#20. Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?
Max Stirner
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Charlotte Bronte
#24. Humans are not a commodity, nor is our humanity. Fight to save the lives of those who can not save themselves, and in turn, you will have saved your soul.
L.M. Fields
#25. 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
#26. I believe the only reality is how we treat each other. The morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme.
Joss Whedon
#27. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
#28. Morality is standing by your friends, standing by people when it's not popular. It's sacrificing things on a big international stage, and sometimes it's sacrificing your basic comforts.
Sandra Bernhard
#29. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
#30. It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.
H. Rider Haggard
#31. 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
#32. There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.
Henry Ward Beecher
#33. First, where the law is the major source for bioethics, morality is too easily confused with legality and moral questions too quickly reduced to legal questions. Moreover, the law is better at
telling us what not to do than at providing ends and goals worthy of our humanity.
Allen Verhey
#34. Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
Mikhail Bakunin
#36. It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.
George Bernard Shaw
#37. The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility. The danger is here now
not only from a military enemy but from an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#38. This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale
Christopher Hitchens
#39. I came a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spending your strength, an irritation. Morality is a weakness of the brain.
Arthur Rimbaud
#40. We spoke of religion, and how much of it is just a custom preserving practical codes of health, morality and justice that are no longer necessary for group survival (like not eating animals with cloven hooves).
Marilyn Manson
#41. The main thing is you have to be under the protection of spirituality, under the protection of morality, under the protection of divine laws. If you're not under that protection, you can get caught up into anything.
Nirmala Srivastava
#42. Morality and honor are not to be confused. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H.L. Mencken
#43. A man is not moral because he is obedient through fear or ignorance. Morality lives in the realm of perceived obligation ...
Robert Green Ingersoll
#44. 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
#45. How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.
Karl Rahner
#46. Real wealth is not the weight of coins; it is the net value of your honesty
Munia Khan
#48. The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate, it is immutable.
Patrick Henry
#49. Action is the only reality; not only reality, but morality as well.
Abbie Hoffman
#50. 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
#51. Mere heathen morality, and not Jesus Christ, is preached in most of our churches.
George Whitefield
#52. 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
#53. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera
#54. Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality ... an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.
Parker J. Palmer
#55. Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose.
Michael R. French
#56. [M]orality is not a ritualistic obedience to a code of behavior imposed by an external authority. It is rather a healthy habit pattern that you have consciously and voluntarily chosen to impose upon yourself because you recognize its superiority to your present behavior.
Henepola Gunaratana
#57. It's not that there is a terrible morality in Hollywood. I think there isn't any. There isn't any, by and large.
Alan Arkin
#58. don't mind good, sweet, gentle things, like - oh, like almost everybody, if only they are sweet and good naturally. But generally they are not. Their sweetness is the result of education or morality, or something tedious, not the result of their natures, of themselves.
E.F. Benson
#59. This isn't about simple morality. Not anymore. The world is too big, and there are worlds in worlds. They were always there, in everyone's heads, but now we can see them. We're starting to bleed into each other.
Brandon R. Chinn
#60. We must recognise that duty and morality vary under different circumstances; not that the man who resists evil is doing what is always and in itself wrong, but that in the different circumstances in which he is placed it may become even his duty to resist evil.
Swami Vivekananda
#61. Obviously, marriage is not a synonym for morality. But stable marriages and families do encourage moral behavior.
Gary Bauer
#62. History is a tragedy, not a morality tale.
I. F. Stone
#63. But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.
Anne Rice
#64. Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.
J. Budziszewski
#65. In the deepest, most central place of our being, we don't want to cross God and our not wanting to is the beginning of wisdom.
Ken Wilson
#66. 'Power Play' is a morality tale for our post-Enron world and - not incidentally - wildly entertaining. Nothing wrong with that.
M.J. Rose
#67. When poverty is more disgraceful than even vice, is not morality cut to the quick?
Mary Wollstonecraft
#68. The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.
J. Budziszewski
#69. There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
George Eliot
#70. There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.
Steve Allen
#71. 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
#72. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.
Steven Pinker
#73. 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
#74. Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.
Aldous Huxley
#75. Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
Ayn Rand
#76. 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
#77. Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.
Sam Harris
#78. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#79. 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
#80. Those who defend traditional morality will sometimes admit that it is not perfect, but contend that any criticism will make all morality crumble.
Bertrand Russell
#81. It is always distressing when outraged morality does not possess the strength of arm to administer direct chastisement on the sinner.
W. Somerset Maugham
#82. We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the crimes of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.
David Sarnoff
#83. The best way to overcome the world is not with morality or self-discipline. Christians overcome the world by seeing the beauty and excellence of Christ. They overcome the world by seeing something more attractive than the world: Christ
Thomas Chalmers
#84. Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
Aldous Huxley
#85. I don't believe in a personal god. It's good to give thanks, whether or not there's a god. There's no reason not to live life to the fullest. Morality is all the more important for people who don't expect to get a piece of celestial candy after they die.
William T. Vollmann
#86. A moral person is someone who accepts the consequences of their own morality, not those of others.
Jo Nesbo
#87. I'm not a good father and they're not children any more; the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.
Wilbur Smith
#88. Where there is no free agency, there can be no morality. Where there is no temptation, there can be little claim to virtue. Where the routine is rigorously proscribed by law, the law, and not the man, must have the credit of the conduct.
William H. Prescott
#89. What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?
Bernhard Schlink
#90. I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.
Mahatma Gandhi
#91. Morality is societal, but kindness is universal. Be kind even if it not always ethical.
Debasish Mridha
#92. I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.
Arthur Rimbaud
#93. Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.
Oprah Winfrey
#94. The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned
Antonio Gramsci
#95. This is human nature: to find a morality that is comfortable and convenient and let it suffice for holiness. But it is not. So you ride your bike to work, or drive a hybrid car - but
John Eldredge
#96. The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good.
Abraham Lincoln, Original Quote
Seth Grahame-Smith
#97. We are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.
George Eliot
#98. Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
Lord Acton
#99. The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.
Neil Young
#100. Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
Aleksandar Hemon
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