Quotes About Moral Acts

#1. The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, I was wrong.

Sydney J. Harris

#2. One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

Robert M. Pirsig

#3. A moral person is one who constantly exercises, and acts on, his best rational judgment.

Barbara Branden

#4. The moral judgments and acts of the soul all involve an exercise of reason, so that it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions.

Robert Lewis Dabney

#5. The best-regulated home is always that in which the discipline is the most perfect, and yet where it is the least felt. Moral discipline acts with the force of a law of nature.

Samuel Smiles

#6. Each individual in fact has moral responsibility for the acts which he personally performs; no one can be exempted from this responsibility, and on the basis of it everyone will be judged by God himself.

Pope John Paul II

#7. Moral obligation is to me so very strong a Stimulant, that in 9 cases out of ten it acts as a Narcotic. The Blow that should rouse, stuns me.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#8. That is not true, but we lack the moral authority to endorse them (acts of euthanasia). What we do instead is what you have just seen. We commend the dying to Saint Hubert and tie them to a pillar in order to prolong and intensify their suffering.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#9. The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

Steven Pinker

#10. Our egoism gains nothing from acts of love, but the world gains all the more. Esotericism tells us that love is to the world what the Sun is for outer life. No soul could thrive if love departed from the world. Love is the "moral" Sun of the world.

Rudolf Steiner

#11. 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

#12. We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.

Peter Singer

#13. 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

#14. As a democratic society, Malawi has a moral obligation to ensure that each and every injustice, whether through acts of commission or omission, is met with deliberate and tangible action.

Joyce Banda

#15. 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

#16. Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle.

#17. I'd always liked the idea that drama acts at its best as a kind of arena for debate, not just about the thing itself, but also producing aesthetic, stylistic, political and moral discussions.

Jeremy Northam

#18. The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.

Paul Bloom

#19. Religion acts as a moral gardener, to weed out, or suppress, evil tendencies, which, like weeds and nettles, would shoot up spontaneously in the wonderful compost of the garden, if unwatched.

Henry Morton Stanley

#20. Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.

Leon Trotsky

#21. One might have thought the world would stop ascribing moral equivalence between acts of terrorism and acts of punishing terrorism. It has not happened that way.

Theodore Bikel

#22. Forcing people to be generous isn't humanitarian, effective, compassionate or moral. Only acts that are truly voluntary for all concerned can be truly compassionate.

Harry Browne

#23. He was only a child, doing what adults led him to do; but somewhere in his heart he knew that even a child is a real person, that a child's acts are real acts, that even a child's play is not without moral context.

Orson Scott Card

#24. However, the outcome is inconsistent with the general principle that people should not be punished in the absence of culpability, since one who acts on the basis of a reasonable mistake of law lacks moral blameworthiness.

Joshua Dressler

#25. From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.

Jurgen Habermas

#26. If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.

Billy Graham

#27. [It is a] happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrant.

Thomas Jefferson

#28. One problem with making moral compromises is that doing the right thing becomes increasingly difficult: it requires admitting that one's earlier acts were wrong. In effect, to get clean, one must first get dirtier, a step that few proved willing to take.

Dan McMillan

#29. If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.

Steven Pinker

#30. Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature ; by his intellectual nature ; by his moral nature - that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.

Richard Maurice Bucke

#31. Moral courage further demands that you assume the responsibility for your own acts.

Napoleon Hill

#32. Just as we cannot stop the birds flying off and upwards at our approach, so there is no way of preventing the acts which we perform from giving rise to moral values.

Philip Thody

#33. When any individual or collection of individuals acts in disobedience to the moral order, short-term gratification may be experienced; but such behavior produces an inevitable deterioration of the personality and leads to a long term loss of what is truly worthy.

Ronald H. Nash

#34. Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

John Dewey

#35. Every practical science is concerned with human operations; as moral science is concerned with human acts, and architecture with buildings. But sacred doctrine is chiefly concerned with God, whose handiwork is especially man. Therefore it is not a practical but a speculative science.

Thomas Aquinas

#36. It is the whip that clerics use on the laity, making the sheep slaves to whatever moral code the shepherds espouse. It is a catalyst for suicide and untold other acts of selfishness and stupidity.

Kevin Hearne

#37. An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness.

Kilroy J. Oldster