Top 100 Quotes About Morality
#1. Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.
Abhijit Naskar
#2. Teaching at best beckons us to morality, but it is not in itself efficacious. Teaching is like a mirror. It can show you if your face is dirty, but it the mirror will not wash your face.
Ravi Zacharias
#3. Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
Aleister Crowley
#4. Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a good thing to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.
Thomas Sowell
#5. The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
Andrew Carnegie
#6. Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#7. Honesty and interest are as intimately connected in the public as in the private code of morality.
Thomas Jefferson
#8. Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women's morality means that nothing else matters- not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That's all.
Jessica Valenti
#9. If morality is extinguished, there is no human being left.
Gitta Sereny
#10. But the imposition of morality onto science, - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.
Bill Condon
#11. The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#12. I have long had a tendency to tie marksmanship to morality. The essence of good marksmanship is self-control, and self-control is the essence of good citizenship. It is too easy to say that a good shot is automatically a good man, but it would be equally incorrect to ignore the connection.
Jeff Cooper
#13. Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I'd heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we'd like to think. Our bodies can not know absolute freedom but our minds can, can at least try.
Walter Mosley
#15. Funny how morality, which always seems so black and white can be influenced so completely by what you were raised to believe.
Neal Shusterman
#16. Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.
Richard Davenport-Hines
#17. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?
Walter Rodney
#18. Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#19. Absolute morality leads logically to absolute intolerance.
Michael Shermer
#20. Genuine morality is preserved only in the school of adversity; a state of continuous prosperity may easily prove a quick sand to virtue
Friedrich Schiller
#22. Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.
George Washington
#24. Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
Honore De Balzac
#25. I genuinely don't like Los Angeles. L.A. is this little petri dish of lack of morality.
Chris Eigeman
#26. we ought to develop and practice a secular and human morality based on logical and scientific thinking.
Dr. Ramendra
#27. For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear.
Jed Rubenfeld
#29. The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#31. What is called the morality of a society is no more than a consequence of the morality of individuals. There is, by the same token, no such thing as a purely private morality, for the morals of private citizens are public in effect, and are increasingly so.
Wendell Berry
#32. Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them.
Terry Eagleton
#34. In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality ... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.
George Weigel
#35. Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect?
Paul Kalanithi
#36. Morality is a luxury we can't afford out here. There's no right or wrong, just survival or death.
Peter Milligan
#37. Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.
Benjamin Franklin
#38. But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
Julian Barnes
#39. Those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion or politics ... The things that will destroy us are: politics without principles, pleasures without conscience, knowledge without character, business without morality.
Mahatma Gandhi
#40. We need leadership that can elevate religion and morality to their position of paramount importance and thus eliminate growing selfishness, immorality and materialism.
George W. Romney
#41. Leaders can be moral-and they should be moral-without imposing their morality on others.
Geraldine Ferraro
#42. Piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of that state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice.
Joseph Story
#43. How can you construct a morality if there's no morality inherent in the way things are? You might be able to delude yourself into thinking you had 'created' a morality, but that's all it would be, an illusion.
John Lennox
#44. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.
Paul Ryan
#45. In our generation there is no agreed-upon framework. All issues are up for grabs. Morality no longer has any broad-based theology upon which to rest its case. We are no longer a 'Christian nation,' not even a 'Judeo-Christian culture.'
F. LaGard Smith
#46. 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
#47. Perhaps you confuse virtue and convention, gentlemen. Conventionality is not morality, and self-righteousness is not religion.
Juliet Gael
#48. Outward as well as inward morality helps to form the idea of a true Christian freedom. We are right to lay stress on inwardness, but in this world there is no inwardness without an outward expression.
Meister Eckhart
#49. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair.
Albert Einstein
#50. The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.
Wilhelm Reich
#51. Provision must be made for the extension of speedy and effective assistance when any African State is threatened with military aggression. We cannot rely solely on international morality.
Haile Selassie
#52. The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
Lord Acton
#53. There's no black and no white, just shades of grey ... But the small betrayals lead to bigger ones, morality is eroded.
Kate Mosse
#54. That's why the firm foundation of every land must be morality untarnished which, if destroyed, Rome will fall and founder.
Daniel Berzsenyi
#55. The morality code that remains after the religion that produced it is rejected is like the perfume that lingers in an empty bottle.
Sigrid Undset
#56. Hunger and necessity are poor teachers of morality. A society that cannot provide the basics of life does not get its laws obeyed.
A.J. Quinnell
#57. Sanctimony is the most inexpensive form of morality. It costs us nothing to make much of small matters in others.
David Horowitz
#59. Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde
#60. If religion is the cornerstone of morality, how come I so often find myself explaining why I don't hate god to someone who's expressed hatred for atheists, scientists, feminists, gays, intellectuals, and all other forms of infidels?
Lindsey Brown
#61. We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
Jane Austen
#62. Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do ... Ultimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves.
Howard Gardner
#63. I would say I am very much more interested in ethics than in code/ morality. I think it's in this way that one avoids the conservatism inherent in "the moral".
Richard Marshall
#64. If there is an essence to this wordly life, then it is the basis of honesty [morality]. If you have little wealth but have honesty even then you will attain peace. And if you do not have honesty but lot of wealth even then restlessness will remain within.
Dada Bhagwan
#65. The truth is neither good nor bad. It is above evil. Above morality. It doesn't offer anything besides itself.
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
#66. Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.
Vine Deloria Jr.
#67. Morality he found amusing, in the obscure way that only a man with a Ph.D. in philosophy could find such things amusing, but justice and ethics were inflexible measures, applicable to all, and not to be joked about.
Charlie Huston
#68. Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
Ayn Rand
#69. In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#70. I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.
Charles Kingsley
#71. Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.
Robert Bolt
#72. [W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.
Jonathan Haidt
#73. Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken.
Lemuel K. Washburn
#74. Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible.
Mark Hopkins
#75. Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Octavio Paz
#76. Christianity is not about morality. It's about reality.
Henry Cloud
#78. I owed no morality to those who would extort it by force
Steve Aylett
#79. All effective actions require the passport of morality.
Saul
#80. I'd forgotten it's an important thing to give thought to your morality and how you intend to live your life.
Lee Pace
#81. These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.
R.H. Blyth
#82. Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality.
Dee Hock
#83. The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality
which became America's
was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.
Hugh Hefner
#84. The mourning of inadequacy is a weeping that catches the attention of God ... The happiest day of my life was when I realized that my own ability, my own goodness, my own morality was insufficient in the sight of God; and I publicly and openly acknowledged my need of Christ.
Billy Graham
#85. One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.
Steven Pinker
#86. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil. The greatest way to do that is through love. I believe firmly that love is a transforming power than can lift a whole community to new horizons of fair play, goodwill, and justice.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#88. It is not that religion is merely useless, it is mischievous. It is mischievous by its idle terrors; it is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its promises.
Frances Wright
#89. First live to be 'sincere' then 'morality' will follow.
Dada Bhagwan
#90. Morality is the infusion of chocolate into the veins of all men
Tristan Tzara
#91. Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.
Albert Einstein
#92. Cruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened.
Immanuel Kant
#93. As a parent and a citizen, I'll take a Bill Gates (or Warren Buffett) over Steve Jobs every time. If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs's example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
Eric Alterman
#95. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
George Washington
#96. Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.
Voltaire
#97. When goodness is lost, it is replaced by morality.
Laozi
#98. Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#99. Without morality and virtue most things in a free society fall apart. But with them, anything is possible.
Glenn Beck
#100. To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) - this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
Giorgio Agamben
