Top 100 Quotes About Morality
#1. Sex: In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.
Marlene Dietrich
#2. We need to teach our people to speak what is right as the highest manifestation of morality
Sunday Adelaja
#3. You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. 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
#5. Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?
David Foster Wallace
#6. Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.
Barry Unsworth
#8. One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.
Arthur C. Clarke
#9. 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
#10. I argue that in a world where people must support their opinions with evidence and reason rather than faith, we would experience less conflict over issues like assisted suicide, gay rights, birth control, and sexual morality.
Jerry A. Coyne
#11. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Camille Paglia
#12. Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.
E. O. Wilson
#13. She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.
Jodi Picoult
#14. A myth is 'a narrative involving supernatural or fancied persons embodying popular ideas or social phenomena.' Women love telling stories ... the girl-group is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound.
Lucy O'Brien
#15. Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Adams
#16. Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share and sought advantage over no one.
Robert Breault
#17. Ethics and I had crossed paths recently, and I'm not sure that I fell on the right side of the morality line.
S.C. Stephens
#18. There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
#19. The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#20. The entire morality of the world could be summarized in the words, do as others do.
Multatuli
#21. What idiot told you the law was concerned with morality?
V. St. Clair
#22. 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
#23. But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.
Leo Tolstoy
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.
Bob Woodward
#28. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Charlotte Bronte
#29. 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
#30. Morality has nothing in common with politics.
Bob Dylan
#31. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." The question is: where is the line?
Dan Ariely
#32. Morality and legality have nothing to do with one another. I'm more than fine with breaking a law if it disagrees with my values and morals.
Ashly Lorenzana
#33. The sign of a good conscience is for a man to be in support of basically everything that Westboro Baptist isn't.
Luke Myer
#34. 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
#35. War is the action of low man: Low in morality, low in humanity, and low in all the good values!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#36. 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
#37. One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent ... Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.
Hunter S. Thompson
#38. Fin," she whispered. "What do you need?" He covered her hand, right there in her lap, then let go quickly and dipped his head to try to meet her downcast eyes. He smelled so good--like intrigue and dubious morality. It sent a delicious shiver down her arms.
Lauren Christopher
#39. Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.
John Adams
#40. There's going to be a demand for perfectionism on the part of Hillary Clinton, or any other pro-equality woman candidate, that would not be made of men. There are going to be attacks based on different standards of morality and different standards of dress and physical attractiveness.
Gloria Steinem
#41. Even the false accusations of a person of dubious morality can taint the reputation of an upright servant.
Hock G. Tjoa
#42. 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
#43. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.
C.S. Lewis
#44. There's nothing worse than the British in one of their fits of morality.
Stephen Fry
#45. If you live long enough there's no line that you won't cross.
Tracy Manaster
#46. 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
#47. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it
I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
Joseph Conrad
#48. 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
#50. It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.
Mohsin Hamid
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.
John Stuart Mill
#55. Morality is the clipping of a bird's wings.
Marty Rubin
#56. When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?
Rebecca McNutt
#57. There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.
Mark Twain
#58. 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
#59. Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#60. Treat others as thou wouldst be treated. What thou likest not for thyself, dispense not to others.
Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
#61. Wear modest, clean clothing. Your clothing doesn't need to be new and [it] should have some fashion of course, but [it] should be clean, modest, and neat. Be dignified in your outward manner and in your inward morality.
Bruce R. McConkie
#63. Rational egoism is the only morality that is for human life; thus, it is the only morality that is actually moral. Those who choose to be rationally self-interested thereby make the most of their life - and they are morally good because of it.
Craig Biddle
#64. No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
A.J. Ayer
#65. Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.
Emile Durkheim
#66. Ethnicity and morality can of course combine, giving the sense that "we" are "good" and "they" are "bad.
Hal Whitehead
#68. The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families.
John Adams
#69. Why didn't they warn us at school? I'm sure if some teacher had said, "Oh and by the way, it feels like someone sandpapering your cervix," they needn't have bothered with all the AIDS warnings and morality stuff.
Kate Long
#70. The morality of clean blood ought to be one of the first lessons taught us by our pastors and teachers. The physical is the substratum of the spiritual; and this fact ought to give to the food we eat, and the air we breathe, a transcendent significance.
William Tyndale
#71. 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
#72. As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.
Roger Penrose
#73. I've often wondered if Morality is an attribute of Reason. Of course, evil is always buttressed by 'reasonable' arguments. Yet, what if True Reason is an attribute of Morality, and True Morality an attribute of Reason?
Rikki Ducornet
#74. For every person who rides with a moral high-horse, they also have a dead horse that they haven't fed lying somewhere out of sight.
Zack W. Van
#75. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
Steven D. Levitt
#76. 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
#77. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
Max Weber
#78. What our species needs, above all else, is a generally accepted ethical system that is compatible with the scientific knowledge we now possess.
Derek Freeman
#79. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
#80. 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
#81. There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
Albert Camus
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.
Henry Ward Beecher
#85. Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.
Susan Pollack
#86. We developed a philosophical credo and applied it consistently. We accept that morality, power, and consensus are the underpinnings for any society and work to maintain all three in balance. Trust and mutual respect are, in a way, the mortar that hold the other three together.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#87. Conscription is the vitality of a nation, the purification of its morality, and the real foundations of all its habits
Napoleon Bonaparte
#88. The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#89. An impostor would not have the same value as the original person in society.
Saaif Alam
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.
Rob Morrow
#93. Sustainable change, after all, depends not upon compliance with external mandates or blind adherence to regulation, but rather upon the pursuit of the greater good.
Douglas B. Reeves
#94. He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago.
Joe Hill
#95. Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.
Thomas Jefferson
#96. There is only one morality, as there is only one geometry.
Voltaire
#97. no doubt that evil is more contagious than good, therefore, it's more powerful.
Anonymous
#98. It is often easier to fight for one's principles than it is to live up to them.
Adlai E. Stevenson II
#99. The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription.
J. Budziszewski
#100. Or should you mourn the rapist, which I guess Christians mourn the people who kill them too.
Nikolas Schreck
