c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The modern mind is like the eye of a man who is too tired to see the difference between blue and green. It fails in the quality that is truly called distinction; and,being incapable of distinction, it falls back on generalisation. The man, instead of having the sense to say he is tired, says he is emancipated and enlightened and liberal and universal.......we find it less trouble to let in a jungle of generalisations than to keep watch upon a logical frontier. But this shapeless assimilation is not only found in accepting things in the lump; it is also found in condemning them in the lump. When the same modern mind does begin to be intolerant, it is just as universally intolerant as it was universally tolerant. It sends things in batches to the gallows just as it admitted them in mobs to the sanctuary. It cannot limit its limitations any more than its license....There are...lunatics now having power to lay down the law, who have somehow got it into their heads that any artistic representation of anything wicked must be forbidden as encouraging wickedness. This would obviously be a veto on any tragedy and practically on any tale. But a moment's thought...would show them that this is simply an illogical generalisation from the particular problem of sex. All dignified civilisations conceal sexual things, for the perfectly sensible reason that their mere exhibition does affect the passions. But seeing another man forge a cheque does not make me want to forge a cheque. Seeing the tools for burgling a safe does not arouse an appetite for being a burglar. But the intelligence in question cannot stop itself from stopping anything. It is automatically autocratic; and its very prohibition proceeds in a sort of absence of mind. Indeed, that is the most exact word for it; it is emphatically absence of mind. For the mind exists to make those very distinctions and definitions which these people refuse. They refuse to draw the line anywhere; and drawing a line is the beginning of all philosophy, as it is the beginning of all art. They are the people who are content to say that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and are condemned to pass their lives in looking for eggs from the cock as well as the hen.
— G.K. Chesterton
Hollywood-Nobody's impressed by anybody because they're all too consumed with trying to cover up their own shortcomings. Hollywood is a microcosm of a world of lazy moral ideals and social indifference where every man is trying to convince himself he's a king.
— J. Matthew Nespoli
Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it.
— Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls
Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up. Washing one's hand didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection.
— Iain Banks, Complicity
Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.
— Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity
By telling lie you can hide the truth, but u can't reject it.
— Munendra Dwivedi
But if you take pleasure in morality, then you are always in deficit.
— Brian Castro, Street to Street
He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. ‘This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don’t let it get complicated. Gray it ain’t. It’s black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.
— Charles Martin, Thunder and Rain
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
In comparison, young unmarried women in America were fortunate: They had a certain measure of sexual freedom. Eighteenth-century parents allowed their daughters to spend tie with suitors unsupervised, and courting couples openly engaged in "bundling," the practice of sleeping together without undressing, in the girls' homes. (Theoretically, that is, they were sleeping together without undressing: in fact, premarital pregnancy boomed during the period of 1750 to 1780, when bundling was nearly universal.) But by the turn of the century, in a complete reversal of previous beliefs about women's sexuality, the idea took hold that only men were carnal creatures; women were thought to be passionless and therefore morally superior.
— Leora Tanenbaum, Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.
— John  Williams, Augustus
If a man says he is Christian, yet he has no problems knocking you up, having premarital sex or living in sin with you, then you have to ask yourself, “What version of Christ does he believe in?
— Shannon L. Alder
I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.
— Barry M. Goldwater
I have attended church regularly since I was less than a week old. I've listened to sermons about virtue, sermons against vice. I have heard about money, time management, tithing, abstinence, and generosity. I've listened to thousands of sermons. But I could count on one hand the number of sermons that were a simple proclamation of the gospel of Christ.
— Rich Mullins
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, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
But the Dark cannot claim what Light does not surrender.
— C.L. Wilson, Crown of Crystal Flame
On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
We are against ignorance. We feel that you have to educate yourself, no matter what the situation is. People who refuse to educate themselves - people who refuse to find out what something is about, that they're frightened of - find comfort in being ignorant.”--Zeena Schreck Interview for KJTV-1990
— Zeena Schreck
I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born. But he alone can take over the freedom of men who appeases their conscience. With bread you were given an indisputable banner: give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience - oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience. In this you were right. For the mystery of man's being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him. That is so, but what came of it? Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it still more for them! Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond men's strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all - and who did this? He who came to give his life for them! Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it and forever burdened the kingdom of the human soul with its torments. You desired the free love of man, that he should follow you freely. seduced and captivated by you. Instead of the firm ancient law, men had henceforth to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him as a guide - but did it not occur to you that he would eventually reject and dispute even your image and your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice? They will finally cry out that the truth is not in you, for it was impossible to leave them in greater confusion and torment than you did, abandoning them to so many cares and insoluble problems. Thus you yourself laid the foundation for the destruction of your own kingdom, and do not blame anyone else for it.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority.
— H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies. If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.
— John N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Innocence still lives within our hearts and the child within each of us knows right from wrong.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Do you keep silent to keep a friendship or do you try to lend your support unconditionally, even if what they are doing goes against everything you believe in? Will it be principles over friendship, morality over love?
— Donna Lynn Hope
It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?' 'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Life was indeed cruel
—  but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it.
So you think money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim you product by tears, or of looters, who can take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property.
— G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi
Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?
— Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts
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, Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results
What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
The moral high ground to which I aspired had turned into a slippery slope.
— Alfred Alcorn, The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man
The fractured self is not something that needs to be rectified fixed and made whole; by freeing thought of the blinkers of representation, the space of fracture, of multiplicity (as opposed to unity) becomes a powerful place and one from which the most radical ideas can emerge.
— Ria Banerjee
Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.
— Émile Zola, Une Page d'amour
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.
— Oscar Wilde
I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol.
— G.K. Chesterton
Books of the sages of the ages reflect upon in stages
—  like honey their words on the tongue give due savour.”{Source: A Green Desert Father}
Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
People today...it seems they are good, or sometimes evil, mostly by inertia, not by choice.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Alloy of Law
[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.
— Arthur Miller, The Crucible
Don't judge me. Ethics and morality no longer exist in our world. It's a luxury of the past, afforded only to those who had a future.
— T.M.  Williams, Undead Winter
It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.
— Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions Virtues
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them
— George Orwell
But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at the centre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of 'treaty with reality' could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one's soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, 'This is my business and mine only.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
As the sailor locates his position on the sea by "shooting" the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God.
— A.W. Tozer
I don't think God is so jealous about our worship of Him that He will want to separate those who serve His purposes, serve His goodness, because they have read a book, even one written by an atheist, and have been moved, or because they have wanted to be fair all their lives, but have never stepped in a church, from those who have heard God's words in church or read His words in the Bible and become convinced by them.
— Dorothy Day
We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.
— Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Listen to me, kid. It don’t matter what happens. It don’t matter what anybody thinks or does. All that matters is that you keep fightin’ and never, you hear me? never give up.
— J. Grace Pennington, Never
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, Not Your Mother's Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better
Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy.
— Darrell Drake, Everautumn
Community service has become a patch for morality. You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck.
— Timothy J. Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World
No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"—not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress.
— Vladimir Nabokov
No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown
She murdered for her truth, and they had died for theirs.
— Darrell Drake, Within Ruin
Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.
— Ozzy Osbourne, I Am Ozzy
Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ
...all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty... ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
The witness of solid moral character to a righteous way of life must never be underestimated.
— Arthur F. Holmes, Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions
Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.
— Thomas H. Cook, The Quest for Anna Klein: An Otto Penzler Book
America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.
— Fulton J. Sheen
The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.
— Fulton J. Sheen
99% of all addicts are liars and thieves. This might sound unfair and even close-minded, but it's the truth. There are some exceptions to the rules, but they are incredibly rare. Most people are no match for their addictions. They will be driven to do things they would normally never have considered all in the name of getting high. Sad, but true. So if you're thinking of trying drugs, keep in mind that all the people you will be dealing with are likely to steal from you and lie to you at your own expense.
— Ashly Lorenzana
I can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point find yourself doing something that at one point you swore you'd never do. You'll do it for the sake of getting high, either directly or indirectly. Trust me. It will happen. You might think you know yourself better than anyone, but you have yet to become acquainted with your addiction. It will introduce itself in ways that you never thought were possible.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Until one nation ceases its attempts to dominate another, there will never be true freedom. Until one religion relinquishes its quest to prove its god superior to that of another, there shall never be world peace. We will never truly prosper or experience lasting harmony, until we refrain from preaching the gospel of our own moral values and our personal preferences by forcing it upon others.
— Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny
Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
— William Faulkner
Not everyone can be bribed with meat, Oberon." "They Can't? Oh! you mean they're vegetarian.""No, they eat meat. It just doesn't sway their decision making process." "Well that... that's just wrong, Atticus!Are they Monsters? It's like they have no moral center!
— Kevin Hearne, Trapped
When the prophet, a complacent fat man,Arrived at the mountain-topHe cried: "Woe to my knowledge!I intended to see good white landsAnd bad black lands—But the scene is grey.
— Stephen Crane, Complete Poems of Stephen Crane
Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
— Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Since the basic cause of man’s anxiety is the possibility of being either a saint or a sinner, it follows that there are only two alternatives for him. Man can either mount upward to the peak of eternity or else slip backwards to the chasms of despair and frustration. Yet there are many who think there is yet another alternative, namely, that of indifference. They think that, just as bears hibernate for a season in a state of suspended animation, so they, too, can sleep through life without choosing to live for God or against Him. But hibernation is no escape; winter ends, and one is then forced to make a decision—indeed, the very choice of indifference is itself a decision. White fences do not remain white fences by having nothing done to them; they soon become black fences. Since there is a tendency in us that pulls us back to the animal, the mere fact that we do not resist it operates to our own destruction. Just as life is the sum of forces that resist death, so, too, man’s will must be the sum of the forces that resist frustration. A man who has taken poison into his system can ignore the antidote, or he can throw it out the window; it makes no difference which he does, for death is already on the march. St. Paul warns us, “How shall we escape it we neglect so great a salvation” (Heb 2:3). By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward. There are no plains in the spiritual life, we are either going uphill or coming down. Furthermore the pose of indifference is only intellectual. The will must choose. And even though an “indifferent” soul does not positively reject the infinite, the infinite rejects it. The talents that are unused are taken away, and the Scriptures tell us that, “But because though art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16).
— Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul: Timeless Wisdom on Finding Serenity and Joy by the Century's Most Acclaimed Catholic Bishop
The number one responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow.
— Ron Paul
I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.
— Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any actual data for his assertions. They are nothing more than the mild musings of a wealthy British man, pondering the state of humanity’s soul between his sips of tea. Had Lewis actually famil- iarized himself with real human beings of the secular sort, per- haps sat and talked with them, he would have had to reconsider this notion. As so many apostates explained to me, morality is most certainly possible beyond the confines of faith. Can people be good without God? Can a moral orientation be sustained and developed outside of a religious context? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes.
— Phil Zuckerman, Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion
Inquisitor Lorsen's thin lip curled. "There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish."Cosca's face hardened as he leaned forwards. "Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it - there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.
— Joe Abercrombie, Red Country
Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.
— Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
...perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.
— Anne Perry, Execution Dock
A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.
— Fulton J. Sheen, On Being Human: Reflections on Life and Living
A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
— G.K. Chesterton
The Sun would have wasted its life but for the evolution of life on earth. The one who gives should be grateful to the one who receives.
— R.N. Prasher
A world that is intellectually mature but morally infantile is on the road to ruin.
— Joshua Loth Liebman, Hope for Man: an optimistic philosophy and guide to self-fulfillment
So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being?"~R. Alan Woods [2012]
— R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal
What's the point in having a mind if you don't use it to make judgements?""What's the point of having a heart if you don't use it to spare others from the harsh judgements of your mind?
— Sarah J. Maas
If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.
— Noam Chomsky
Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.
— Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship
Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.
— Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
A few people would suffer, but a lot of people would be better off.''It's just not right,' said Kevin stubbornly. 'Maybe not. But neither's your way of looking at it. There doesn't have to be a right side and a wrong side. both sides can be right, or both sides can be wrong...
— John Marsden, Tomorrow, When the War Began
Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
The popular concept–that we should each determine our own morality–is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after each of the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the auditorium for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was that 'Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.' I always responded to the speakers by asking, 'Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?' They would invariable say, 'Yes, of course.' Then I would ask, “Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is "there" that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?' Almost always, the response to that question was silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.
— Timothy J. Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
Existential depression has always annoyed me
—  it is one of the world's most pointless forms of suffering.
We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want more community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it.
— James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil
To be charitable, one may admit that the religious often seem unaware of how insulting their main proposition actually is. Exchange views with a believer even for a short time, and let us make the assumption that this is a mild and decent believer who does not open the bidding by telling you that your unbelief will endanger your soul and condemn you to hell. It will not be long until you are politely asked how you can possibly know right from wrong. Without holy awe, what is to prevent you form resorting to theft, murder, rape, and perjury? It will sometimes be conceded that non-believers have led ethical lives, and it will also be conceded (as it had better be) that many believers have been responsible for terrible crimes. Nonetheless, the working assumption is that we should have no moral compass if we were not somehow in thrall to an unalterable and unchallengeable celestial dictatorship. What a repulsive idea!
— Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
To be ethical is to endeavor to find one's proper place in the larger scheme of things rather than to seek to assert human superiority over the natural world.
— Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship
Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost.
— Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories
There is nothing as dangerous as an economist who only knows economics except the moral philosopher who knows no economics.
— Peter J. Boettke
Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance.
— Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship
Two wrongs' create an additional problem.'A wrong' plus 'A right' creates a remorse.'Two rights' create a solution.
— Emmanuel Aghado
He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it?
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual.
— Håkan Nesser
The supernatural worldview is causing a great number of otherwise intelligent people to cling to a collection of atavistic concepts that have not, and never will serve humanity in any ultimately beneficial way. Any benefits that spirituality ostensibly provides to its adherents, can be found equally in the worldview of philosophy and ethics, communities of other kinds, and so on. It's a myth that the only morality, hope, purpose and comfort to be found, resides only in the supernatural.
— Kelli Jae Baeli, Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology
Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves
—  it is the handiwork of terror.
How I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indication of my reverence for life than the antiabortion sticker on the bumper of my car.
— Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
— Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No," though all the world say "Yes.
— Orison Swett Marden, Pushing To The Front
It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.
— John Hersey
The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.
— Leon Trotsky
Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves
—  he called upon the Proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Who fawns before the precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!
...Or should you mourn the rapist, which I guess Christians mourn the people who kill them too.
— Nikolas Schreck
I question the moral integrity of anyone who says they have no regrets.
— Michelle Templet
In ambiguous situations, it's a good bet that the crowd will generally stick together – and be wrong.
— Doug Sherman and William Hendricks
We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty.
— Frank Tallis, A Death in Vienna
That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
In a truly moral society, most of our current laws would not exist.
— Michelle Templet
Do right simply because it is right.
— Alex Treacher
morality... comes at a price.
— Miguel Syjuco
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
The town was paper, but the memories were not.
— John Green, Paper Towns
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Humans, not places, make memories.
— Ama Ata Aidoo
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl
Remembering is easy. It's forgetting that's hard.
— Brodi Ashton, Everneath
Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see. 
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Memories, even bittersweet ones, are better than nothing.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.
— Sara Zarr
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
— Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell.
— Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
Sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if put to words.
— Nova Ren Suma, Imaginary Girls
Maybe memories should be left the way they are.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.
— Samuel Beckett
[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then. The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.
— Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It
Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.
— Oscar Wilde
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
— Saul Bellow