Quotes About Being Moral

#1. Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life everytime.

Michael Crichton

#2. The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.

Dorothy Day

#3. 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

#4. Being moral or attending church regularly is not the same thing as having a personal relationship with Christ.

Osar Adeyemi

#5. If you had to pick between being moral and successful, obviously I'd choose to be moral. However if you can choose both, will you choose both? I'd say definitely.

Chade-Meng Tan

#6. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Oscar Wilde

#7. Our moral foundation is built on the fundamental law that God (if there is a God, which there is not) would not wish to be worshipped in the perverted and misconceived ways of human beings, with their righteous violence and prejudices and hypocrisies. Doubt, or cease being moral.

Joshua Ferris

#8. The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.

Herbert Spencer

#9. Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.

Ben Marcus

#10. I'd say a man is someone who is honest, strong-minded, moral, genuine, just a good human being.

Logan Lerman

#11. I think the Harry books are actually very moral, but some people just object to witchcraft being mentioned in a children's book.

J.K. Rowling

#12. My lyrics say I have morals, I have confidence, I have weaknesses, I have strong points, that I am a human being.

Kendrick Lamar

#13. Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

Emile Durkheim

#14. The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life

Adolf Hitler

#15. Until ... the promiscuous woman is recognized, not only in law but in public opinion, as being neither better nor worse than the promiscuous man, equality has not been won in the moral sphere.

Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

#16. I will not become a Napoleon nor an Alexander, and labour for my own ambition; but I will labour for freedom and for the moral well-being of man.

Lajos Kossuth

#17. The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#18. The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

Tim O'Brien

#19. Education has nothing whatever to do with moral deterioration; and if one must admit that it develops a resolute spirit among the people, that is far from being a defect.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#20. As a result, the highly civilized man can endure incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain. Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great advantage over the savage.

Lafcadio Hearn

#21. This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#22. 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

#23. To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#24. That's the problem with having a moral code. We want to destroy the jerkish part of the jerks, but we want to save the human being underneath.

David Levithan

#25. The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

Simone Weil

#26. The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material

Sri Aurobindo

#27. All moral elevation consists first and foremost of being weaned from the momentary.

Soren Kierkegaard

#28. I think that Hollywood is sort of guilty of having a moral blind eye on this subject. While at the same time, you know, being involved in a lot of liberal causes and being involved very militantly, Hollywood is, in fact, guilty of helping to addict people to smoke.

Joe Eszterhas

#29. Ironically, moral relativists often even pride themselves on being morally superior to others.

Nancy Pearcey

#30. The kosmos works by harmony of tensions, like lyre and bow. Good and evil are one. On the one hand God sees all as well, fair, and good; on the other hand a human being sees injustice here, justice there. Justice in our minds is strife. We cannot help but see war makes us as we are.

Heraclitus

#31. 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

#32. I do feel that even though I didn't grow up being a big sci-fi fan or comic books or superhero fan, I felt myself definitely gravitate towards these movies that have a high concept and yet they're giving you a moral dilemma within that.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#33. The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#34. Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.

Immanuel Kant

#35. She is so totally absorbed in a vocation - both a gift and a mastering passion - that she has no time to be absorbed with the self's worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.

George Will

#36. Moral courage can be lonely indeed. People don't mind being trapped, as long as no one else is free. But stage a break, and everybody else begins to panic.

William Deresiewicz

#37. Mahmoud, sir. No, Doctor Mahmoud is not well. A - a slight nervous breakdown, sir. Van Tromp reflected that being dead drunk was the moral equivalent thereof.

Robert A. Heinlein

#38. You should avoid being drawn into things, and especially into other people's business. ... If you're tough, and ballsy, and well... not as wimpish and idiotic as everyone else... shouldn't you offer people support? Don't you have kind of a moral obligation?

Katarina Bivald

#39. I do think the moral line you walk all the time about putting something in for the sake of the film and not being affected by people's lives is a very tough one.

Gillian Armstrong

#40. I like the idea of being a postmodern moral philosopher - or perhaps a perverse moral philosopher.

Richard Marshall

#41. We have a moral obligation to make sure the people who are being required to work have the opportunity to work. We must make sure the jobs are there.

William J. Clinton

#42. We live in an age in which the biblical-moral traditions that have guided us for centuries are increasingly being forgotten.

Meir Soloveichik

#43. Unprecedented financial pressures, and an ever-increasingly aggressive public culture, along with social, moral and spiritual fragmentation, are leading to lives being overwhelmed by stress, intolerable interior isolation and even quiet despair.

Sean Brady

#44. Wouldn't it be a helluva joke if all this were really burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nuthin'?

Dick Gregory

#45. You can judge the moral bearing of a political system, a political institution, a political man by the degree of danger they attach to the fact of being observed through the eyes of a satiric poet.

Roque Dalton

#46. The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#47. No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

Booker T. Washington

#48. Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.

Thomas Sowell

#49. I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.

Salman Rushdie

#50. We have complete choice as individuals: the only decisions we can take are our own. And yet so many species use the state of being an individual as an excuse for inaction, helplessness and irresponsibility.No situation is so overwhelming that action is pointless.
Targassat of Surang.

Karen Traviss

#51. Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.

George Shultz

#52. ...The happy Warrior... is he... who, with a natural instinct to discern what knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; abides by this resolve, and stops not there, but makes his moral being his prime care.

William Wordsworth

#53. True beauty is not related to what color your hair is or what color your eyes are. True beauty is about who you are as a human being, your principles, your moral compass.

Ellen DeGeneres

#54. The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

Whitley Strieber

#55. Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.

Edmund White

#56. The measure of the moral worth of a man is his happiness. The better the man, the more happiness. Happiness is the synonym of well-being

Bruce Lee

#57. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very being quivers and sways under the shock.

Annie Besant

#58. Conscience tells us in our innermost being of the presence of God and of the moral difference between good and evil; but this is a fragmentary message, in no way as distinct and comprehensive as the lessons of the Bible.

Billy Graham

#59. There was a moral foundation to Walt's movies that people tapped into - a basic moral foundation. In Disney films, you see strong values and role models. You see the importance of being kind to others, of serving others, of finding joy even in adversity.

Pat Williams

#60. I think all villains have something in common: they have something that they need or want very, very badly. The stakes are very high and they are not bound by moral codes or being ethical, so they can do anything and will do anything to get what they want.

Donna Murphy

#61. My mom's a mad scientist. It's a lot like being a regular scientist, except without worrying about legal or moral limitations, and it's a commom profession among the scientifically inclined supervillain.

Chelsea M. Campbell

#62. Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.

Albert Einstein

#63. The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

Aldous Huxley

#64. If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

Noel Coward

#65. 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

#66. If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? ... Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.

Ayn Rand

#67. With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at the altar of science, a fallacy, if not a heresy, that could lead to the undoing of the American spirit.

Winston Groom

#68. I think, as written, 'Assassins' simply acknowledges the very human need to be acknowledged. As director, I've got to put aside any particular biases or prejudices that, as a moral human being, this is not an appropriate or acceptable way to get what you want.

Joe Mantello

#69. Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).

George Bernard Shaw

#70. There you go, Harry!" Ron shouted over the noise. "You weren't being thick after all - you were showing moral fiber!

J.K. Rowling

#71. I do listen to myself sometimes and think, 'Is my moral compass so easily swayed by the characters I play, or is it me growing as a human being?'

Andy Serkis

#72. Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

#73. So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.

Alice Munro

#74. Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage.

Jose Celso Barbosa

#75. Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'

P. J. O'Rourke

#76. The existence of strict moral principles has invariably
signified that the biological, and specifically the sexual
needs of man were not being satisfied. Every moral regulation is in itself sex-negating, and all compulsory morality is life-negating.

Wilhelm Reich

#77. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be the first in love. I want you to be the first in moral excellence. I want you to be the first in generosity.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#78. Evil is ... a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world

Marquis De Sade

#79. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.

James W. Loewen

#80. Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Kate Atkinson

#81. Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core - not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life ...

Hillary Clinton

#82. War does not only kill soldiers and warriors. It also kills rules and moral values. No! Those cannot be killed. War kills the pretense at rules and moral values. It also kills the pretense of being human beings...

Sweety Shinde

#83. I class the principle of moral feeling under that of happiness, because every empirical interest promises to contribute to our well-being by the agreeableness that a thing affords, whether profit be regarded.

Immanuel Kant

#84. Sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge ... There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good.

Timothy Keller

#85. Bodily pain affects man as a whole down to the deepest layers of his moral being. It forces him to face again the fundamental questions of his fate, of his attitude toward God and fellow man, of his individual and collective responsibility and of the sense of his pilgrimage on earth.

Pope Pius XII

#86. The moral to the story being: Mr. Binks was a cheating dickweasel, but, you know, marriage is compromise.

Gillian Flynn

#87. Sufism is not a religion or a philosophy, it is neither deism nor atheism, nor is it a moral, nor a special kind of mysticism, being free from the usual religious sectarianism. If ever it could be called a religion, it would only be as a religion of love, harmony, and beauty.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#88. How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

Auberon Herbert

#89. Never jeopardize who you are for a role. Now, I'm not saying you should never change for a role, because the fun of being different characters is adapting different nuances and different parts of the character, but never jeopardize your moral compass or anything like that to have a role.

Yara Shahidi

#90. Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

Charles Spurgeon

#91. Love: the impossible combination of being IN the deep end and being OFF the deep end.

Jennifer Harrison

#92. Callin something a 'moral panic' does not imply that this something does not exist or happened at all and that reaction is based on fantasy, hysteria, delusion and illusion or being duped by the powerful.

Stanley Cohen

#93. By imitating the manners and the mode of life of the West,the Muslims are being gradually forced to adopt the Western moral outlook: for the imitation of outward appearance leads,by degrees, to a corresponding assimilation of the world-view responsible for that appearance.

Muhammad Asad

#94. The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

Julian Baggini

#95. 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

#96. I am convinced if the church went back to the main task of proclaiming the Gospel it would see people being converted to Christ, and it would have a far greater impact on the social, moral, and psychological needs of people than anything else it could possibly do.

Billy Graham

#97. With the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents.

Omar N. Bradley

#98. The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.

Marcus Aurelius

#99. You have to maintain who you are as a person and stay true to yourself - that's my biggest moral as a human being, as well as a very self-deprecating sense of humor.

Josh Hutcherson

#100. All through human history, being a moral person and not being pulled into the dramatics and misbehavior of others had caused intelligent people grief.

James S.A. Corey