Top 56 Quotes About Moralists
#1. Christians are viewed as being "judgmental, homophobic, moralists" who think they are the only ones going to heaven and who "secretly relish the fact that everyone else is going to hell.
Andy Stanley
#2. All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution ...
Leon Trotsky
#3. Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more elevated and spiritual moralists are concerned.
Bertrand Russell
#4. The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.
Robert Payne
#6. [T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Bertrand Russell
#7. Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.
Anthony Bourdain
#8. Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.
Mason Cooley
#9. In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.
Havelock Ellis
#10. It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans.
Max Frisch
#11. There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgement.
Nell Zink
#12. The modern moralists extol ... the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.
Julien Benda
#13. nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination. PERSUASION
Jane Austen
#14. It may almost always be said both of sects and of individuals, who derive their morality from religion, that the better logicians they are, the worse moralists.
John Stuart Mill
#15. Love is the litmus test of whether we are really disciples becoming like Jesus or merely religious moralists using Jesus for our own purposes.
Jim Mindling
#16. Trains running in every direction spit hot ash and cinders. Ministers and moralists feared that the vibrations and jostling of such fast travel would throw weak-minded women into sexual frenzies.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#17. It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.
Gene Wolfe
#19. The idea of the "job" as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is "full employment.
Tom Hodgkinson
#20. In ethics, there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.
John Berger
#21. If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.
Louis Kronenberger
#22. The simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind, than all the (investigations) disquisitions of philosophers and than all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#23. One has said that Christ excelled all other moralists in this, that He puts the padlock not upon the hand, but upon the heart. But He does not use the padlock at all, He renders such a thing unnecessary. He takes the tiger from the heart, and replaces it with the lamb.
Edward Thomson
#24. If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, it were in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts with which all moralists abound.
David Hume
#25. When the evening was over, Anne could not be amused ... nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.
Jane Austen
#26. For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy
Bertrand Russell
#27. I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.
Christopher Hampton
#28. Clinton's egregious act of self-indulgence was outdone by an impeachment based not on constitutionally required high crimes and misdemeanors but on a vindictive determination to bring down a president who had offended self-righteous moralists eager to put a different political agenda in place.
Robert Dallek
#29. The biggest difference between Jesus Christ and ethical and moral teachers who have been deified by man. Is that these moralists came to make bad people good. Jesus came to make dead people live!
Ravi Zacharias
#30. The marvel of television is one means that is being used to try and turn society into a uniform mush. The manipulation and thought control inexorably continues. Mankind is being rinsed out into a group of dull moralists who convince themselves that they are good people.
Erich Von Daniken
#31. Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists.
Stephen R. L. Clark
#32. Thus, all sane moralists admit that one may sometimes tell a lie; but no sane moralist would approve of telling a little boy to practise telling lies, in case he might one day have to tell a justifiable one.
G.K. Chesterton
#33. The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#34. Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil
Mark Twain
#35. We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.
Samuel Johnson
#36. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
John Hersey
#37. A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion; he may be learning not to live but to reason ... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed.
Samuel Johnson
#38. Moralists advise us all to avoid violence, of course, but only insofar as this is possible. They authorize us, at least tacitly, to reply to obvious provocations by the measured counterviolence that I described earlier, and which seems to us always justified.
Rene Girard
#39. In Kant and Nietzsche we have the moralists of German militarism.
Thomas Mann
#40. The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. [T]he moralists of Europe [have] pretended that beasts have no rights ... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous ... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror ...
Arthur Schopenhauer
#42. We have allowed the sexual debate to be defined by women, and that's not right. Men must speak, and speak in their own voices, not voices coerced by feminist moralists.
Camille
#43. The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Walter Lippmann
#44. I think to scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure, and those who refuse to be scandalized are moralists.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
#45. I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
Camille Paglia
#48. I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralisation, degradation, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.
Almeida Garrett
#49. Man's soul has three powers, and God left him prophets for all three: Jewish moralists for his will, Greek philosophers for his mind, and pagan mythmakers for his heart and imagination and feelings. Of course, the latter two are not infallible.
Peter Kreeft
#50. When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
G.K. Chesterton
#51. Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#52. Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.
Bertrand Russell
#53. Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists.
Yasmina Reza
#54. On the other hand, I compared the disquisitions of the ancient moralists to very towering and magnificent palaces with no better foundation than sand and mud:
Rene Descartes
#55. Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.
Stefan Molyneux
#56. With good morality first candidates you'll get bad candor, bad ethics, bad loyalty and bad morality - lastly bad odor will surface to save the day if you maintain good optimism like I do.
Brian Spellman
