c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Verily, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and givinglike kindred; and forbids indecency, and manifest evil, and wrongfultransgression. (The Holy Quran, an-Nahl 16:91)This verse sets forth three gradations of doing good.The first is the doing of good in return for good.This is the lowest gradation and even an average personcan easily acquire this gradation that he should do goodto those who do good to him.The second gradation is a little more difficult thanthe first, and that is to take the initiative in doinggood out of pure benevolence. This is the middlegrade. Most people act benevolently towards thepoor, but there is a hidden deficiency in benevolence,that the person exercising benevolence is consciousof it and desires gratitude or prayer in return for hisbenevolence. If on any occasion the other personshould turn against him, he considers him ungrateful.On occasion he reminds him of his benevolence orputs some heavy burden upon him.The third grade of doing good is graciousness asbetween kindred. God Almighty directs that in thisgrade there should be no idea of benevolence or anydesire for gratitude, but good should be done out ofsuch eager sympathy as, for instance, a mother doesgood to her child. This is the highest grade of doinggood which cannot be exceeded. But God Almightyhas conditioned all these grades of doing good withtheir appropriate time and place. The verse citedabove clearly indicates that if these virtues are notexercised in their proper places they would becomevices.
— Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
I lie awake in my bed, clinging to the brightness I have known, fighting back the tide of darkness, the memories of blood and branding and horror, and the legacy of cruelty that runs in my own veins, shaping my own secret vow and wielding it like a brand against the darkness, whispering it to myself, over and over. I will try to be good.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Scion
Most men—it is my experience—are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.
— Robert Graves, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina
To learn that it's easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Some people that are in charge are usually less intelligent than the people who work under them. The reason why those people are in charge and you aren’t is because you have a conscience.
— Heather Chapple, Write like no one is reading
In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence.
— Adam Smith
Self-betrayal occurs when we do to another what we sense we should not do or don't do what we sense we should. Thus self-betrayal is a sort of moral self-compromise, a violation of our own personal sense of how we ought to be and what we ought to do.
— C. Terry Warner
it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
Right isn't always legal.
— J.S.B. Morse, Gods of Ruin: A Political Thriller
Danny: You can be as morally righteous as you want—in a vacuum—but throw in a second entity and you gotta start acting in response to the other.
— Angry Zodd, Danny the Last Earth Man
Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.
— Russell Brand
If a man like that is killed, there is always another to take his place. That is not the important thing. But to act so that no man dares to strike you because he knows you speak the truth, to act so that you can no longer be arrested because you are asking for the right to live, to act so that all of this will end, both here and elsewhere; that is what should be in your thoughts. That is what you must explain to others, so that you will never again be forced to bow down before anyone, but also so that no one shall be forced to bow down before you. It was to tell you this that I asked you to come, because hatred must not dwell with you.
— Ousmane Sembène, God's Bits of Wood
The only crime is pride.
— Sophocles
The questions of God – meaning in Milton’s phrase “The god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven” – I don’t think psychedelics can address that definitively, but there is another god, a goddess, the goddess of biology, the goddess of the coherent animal human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet. In short, our world! The world that we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from. That world, the psychedelics want to connect us up to… Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you walking around on, and because these psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.
— Terence McKenna
One of the primary reasons we don't seek counsel from the wise people around us is that we already know what we are going to hear--and we just don't want to hear it.
— Andy Stanley, Ask It: The Question That Will Revolutionize How You Make Decisions
All my biggest failures began with the smallest compromises.
— Jori Sams
It's not doing what is right that's hard for a President. It's knowing what is right.
— Lyndon Johnson
Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If the child does not have a strong bond with the parents, then it's like being separated from the herd - those are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood. So keep your contacts as close as you can, they provide an amazing shield against bullies and users.
— Stefan Molyneux
Some people are thoroughly self-centred. This thing goes with me. I need it for moral support.
— Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle
You believe stealing is wrong, but if your family was starving and could not afford bread, wouldn't you say it’s okay to steal a loaf to feed them?
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
We stay the same as we've always been, keeping to the path we've walked our whole lives. Paths that carry so much importance and perceived stability that we are utterly convinced it is the only one to walk – that anyone not walking it with us is being misled.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
You don't sit around looking for reasons to do the right thing
—  it's the bad decisions that require creative reasoning.
Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions.
— Hanif Kureishi
And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass onthe hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.
— Greg Egan
If someone was going to kill someone dear to you, and you could stop that person by killing them instead, would you kill them, knowing it was an effective way to save your loved one?
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
And the two essential and indispensable things are first of all intelligence in the right most sense of that word and goodwill or the old fashion word charity/love, I mean these two things have to go hand in hand. Intelligence and knowledge without charity or goodwill would perhaps be inhuman and goodwill or charity undirected by intelligence or knowledge would be either impotent or misguided, the two have to go together.
— Aldous Huxley
Morality is a easy horse to ride when all the horses are just black and white.
— Jury Nel
What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
To paraphrase Lucretius, there's nothing more useful than to watch a man or woman in times of contagious deadly disease peril combined with his or her assumptions of financial adversity to discern what kind of man or woman they really are.
— T.K. Naliaka
Our greatest moral regrets are always preceded by a series of unwise choices.
— Andy Stanley, Ask It: The Question That Will Revolutionize How You Make Decisions
You never require a teacher to lead you into the wrong path, but you do require a kindly word to conduct you aright.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests valyes and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action.
— John Gardner
We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
— Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people.
— Stefan Molyneux
If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.
— Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus
If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.
— Paul    Watson
Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant of the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; in the cruelest of men, flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men, moments of simplicity and grace.
— John  Williams, Augustus
The principle of freedom is the fundamental principle of morality and the objective of justice.
— Joseph B.H. McMillan, A 'Final Theory' of God
A wholesome fear would be a fit guardian for the citizens.
— Augustine of Hippo, City of God
Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands - conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum.
— Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality
One enjoys the good things more to the extent that one goes to them after having labored in advance, for labors are a sauce for good things
— Xenphon Ephesius
Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox & the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science & the Humanities
for that men have been good does not suffice for them to continue being good, unless one cares about it to the end.
— Xenphon Ephesius
Life is a manifestation of the fundamental laws of physics, and in its highest form, life manifests the fundamental laws of physics as a human organism endowed with a capacity for moral judgement.
— Joseph B.H. McMillan, A 'Final Theory' of God
With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.
— Geoffrey Wood
Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely...
— Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilisation Ou Barbarie
Marx hated weakness in men, and considered the making of moral judgements as the last resort of the weak. To say 'That is morally wrong' is implicitly to say ' I am powerless to stop that, so I will inveigh against it'.
— Paul Robert Wolff
....I came to consider betrayal a moral violation of another's humanity—akin to torture.
— Sandra Lee Dennis, Love and the Mystery of Betrayal
The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams.
— Plato, The Republic
Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.
— Ella Leya, The Orphan Sky
That is morality,I make myself imagine that it is personal.
— Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin
Author:A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape with wanton disregard. His days are spent picking up all the stray free words he can handle and squirreling them away for later use. Subsequently, (days, months or years later) working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture.Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit.
— Leopold Throckmorton
A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is -- no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny -- the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.
— George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
Do what is right and be prepared to pay the price.
— Christopher Taylor
Values aren't buses," she said shortly. "They're not supposed to get you anywhere. They're supposed to define who you are. And I'd rather be touchy-feely than morally bankrupt.
— Jennifer Crusie, Strange Bedpersons
Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life.
— James    Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
We have laws in our country that tell us not to murder or steal and we have police that enforce them. The question is whether you personally need the police to watch you. If they disappeared would you begin killing and thieving because you know no one will come after you, or will you carry on not doing it because it is what you actually believe is right?
— Lewis N. Roe, From A To Theta: Taking The Tricky Subject Of Religion And Explaining Why It Makes Sense In A Way We Can All Understand
Just handle what's in front of you now. and the future will take care of itself. Otherwise, you'll spend most of your life wondering which foot you'll use to step off the curb when you're still only halfway to the corner.
— Dan Millman, Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior
We all need a moral compass. Before you say or do anything, check your inner G.P.S. by asking, "Does this show respect for GodPeopleSelf?
— Pam Farrel, 10 Questions Kids Ask About Sex: *Knowing What to Say*Guiding Them to Wise Decisions*Giving Age-Appropriate Answers
One peculiarity of our present [ethical] climate is that we care much more about our rights than about our 'good'. For previous thinkers about ethics, such as those who wrote the Upanishads, or Confucius, or Plato, or the founders of the Christian tradition, the central concern was the state of one's soul, meaning some personal state of justice or harmony. Such a state might include resignation or renunciation, or detachment, or obedience, or knowledge, especially self-knowledge. For Plato there could be no just political order except one populated by just citizens.... Today we tend not to believe that; we tend to think that modern constitutional democracies are fine regardless of the private vices of those within them. We are much more nervous talking about our good: it seems moralistic, or undemocratic, or elitist. Similarly, we are nervous talking about duty. The Victorian ideal of a life devoted to duty, or a calling, is substantially lost to us. So a greater proportion of our moral energy goes to protecting claims against each other, and that includes protecting the state of our soul as purely private, purely our own business.
— Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics
Chabrias, ever preoccupied to offer the gods the worship due them, was disturbed by the progress of sects of this kind among the populace of large cities; he feared for the welfare of our ancient religions, which yoke men to no dogma whatsoever, but lend themselves, on the contrary, to interpretations as varied as nature itself; they allow austere spirits who desire to do so to invent for themselves a higher morality, but they do not bind the masses to precepts so strict as to engender immediate constraint and hypocrisy.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
If a bully mocks you, just think about your positive values compared to the bully and ignore his or her harsh comments.
— Saaif Alam
For we conceive it as the aim of a philosopher, as such, to do somewhat more than define and formulate the common normal opinions of mankind. His function is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think: he is expected to transcend Common Sense in his premises, and is allowed a certain divergence from Common Sense in his conclusions. It is true that the limits of this deviation are firmly, though indefinitely, fixed: the truth of a philosopher's premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions: if in any important point he be found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method is likely to be declared invalid. Still, though he is expected to establish and concatenate at least the main part of the commonly accepted moral rules, he is not necessarily bound to take them as the basis on which his own system is constructed. Rather, we should expect that the history of Moral Philosophy--so far at least as those whom we may call orthodox thinkers are concerned--would be a history of attempts to enunciate, in full breadth and clearness, those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of mankind may be at once systematized and corrected.
— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
The law says you have the right to hold a nigger, but begging the law's pardon, it lies. . . Is everything right because the law allows it? Suppose they'd pass a law taking away your liberty and making you a slave?
— Solomon Northup
...the standard for moral behaviour must be part of God's nature. He did not create morality, he is morality.
— Lewis N. Roe, From A To Theta: Taking The Tricky Subject Of Religion And Explaining Why It Makes Sense In A Way We Can All Understand
At the same time, however, the necessity for economic change in our countries has led us to conceive laws and accept traditions often at the expense of the individual person. Just when many are becoming conscious of the fundamental heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition to respect each human person, friend or foe, within the actual structure of our society to apply this truth. The very efficiency demanded by our technocratic industrial society renders the life of the old, the unstable and the handicapped almost impossible. as the values of efficiency, individualism, and wealth become the only motivations, they tend to stifle the profound aspirations of man so that little by little he loses all sense of fellowship and community.
— Jean Vanier, Eruption to Hope
Author:A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape, picking up free words and squirreling them away for later use. Subsequently, (days, months or years later)working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture.Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit.
— Leopold Throckmorton
There is no enemy that respect and love will not conquer. The moral authority for survival comes from respect.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Generally speaking, if you think something you want to do is wrong, it is.
— Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis
How simple love would be, Younger Brother, if we only had to bestow it on those who deserved it. Yet what would it be worth? If you gave a poor man a silver coin then that would be a gift. If you expected him to pay you back, then that would make it a loan. We do not loan our love, Lantern. We give it freely.
— David Gemmell, White Wolf
It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves.
— Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
Nothing is more scandalous than a man that is proud of his humility.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality can only make life a long series of missed opportunities.
— Emil M. Cioran
A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
— Russell Baker
The good Lord wouldn't have put it in your heart if it wasn't right.
— Neal Shusterman, Unwind
A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.
— Stefan Molyneux
The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress.
— Muhammad Asad, Islam At The Crossroads
Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Morals
—  the pathetic answer to authoritySeen two gorillas sharing a banana?
Over time, I realized I wasn't necessarily seeing people or things at their best or worst; instead, I was simply seeing things as they were.There didn't seem to be a moral high road to take in most situations, and "What's the right thing to do?" wasn't an easy question.
— Dee Williams
If words come upon our minds, we should express them in order to free ourselves from high anxiety.
— Saaif Alam
Just as Man developed morals and ethical behavior over thousands of years of evolution; so, too, did he invent an authority figure to enforce these behaviors - God.
— Lex Allen
The character of God is an unchanging Northstar five which to find our way through a world of moral complexity.
— Kirby Anderson
Don't hate yourselves because you will regret in the future. Your souls may be valuable in society.
— Saaif Alam
In the future system, you will decide how your bodies look and feel, but only til then will you have the choice.
— David L. Lloyd
Before aligning the body to the future, the mind has to straighten out from the impairment or religion.
— David L. Lloyd
Histories of morality are rarely written in order to inform the reader.
— John Gray
Moral ideas about what constitutes a meritorious or meaningful use of one’s life and opportunities produce specific attitudes towards drug use and intoxication.
— Daniel Waterman
Greaser ' didn't have anything to do with it. My buddy over there wouldn't have done it. Maybe you would have done the same thing, maybe a friend of yours wouldn't have. It's the individual.
— S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
Somehow," she said coldly, "you have confused profitable and not profitable for right and wrong. I, however, have not.
— Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic
For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.
— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
For some people a thing may be right, and for others it may be wrong. There is no greater truth to morality -it is merely an opinion.
— Katherine Ewell, Dear Killer
Contemporary attitudes toward urban parks fall into three levels of sophistication. The first, the most naive assumption, is that parks are just plots of land preserved in their original state. If asked to discuss the issue at all, many laymen have maintained this much, that parks are bits of nature created only in the sense that some decision was made not to build on the land. Many are surprised to learn that parks that an artifact conceived and deliberated as carefully as public buildings, with both physical shape and social usage taken into account. The second, a little more informed, is that parks are aesthetic objects and that their history can be understood in terms of an evolution of artistic styles independent of societal considerations. The third is the view that each of the elements of the urban park represents part of planners' strategy for moral and social reform, so that today, as in the past, the citizen visiting a park is subject to an accumulated set of intended moral lessons.
— Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America
I had as lief have the foppery of freedom as the morality of imprisonment.
— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Shall I not render a service to men in speaking to them only of morality? This morality is so pure, so holy, so universal, so clear, so ancient, that it seems to come from God himself, like the light which we regard as the first of his works. Has he not given men self-love to secure their preservation; benevolence, beneficence, and virtue to control their self-love; the natural need to form a society; pleasure to enjoy, pain to warn us to enjoy in moderation, passions to spur us to great deeds, and wisdom to curb our passions? 
— Voltaire, A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays
In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus.
— Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Requires a Pagan Ethos
The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.
— Stefan Molyneux
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, Sleepless
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, End the Fed
When you etch your moral code in stone, you have no room for editing. You leave open the possibility that, as our ethical views evolve, your code becomes less relevant. You could find yourself with four of ten divine moral laws describing how to treat God and zero that prohibit rape or slavery.
— David G. McAfee
The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes and Avicenna became heretics whose influence disappeared under the weight of rote preaching and practice. Islam as a result has a moral code, a legalistic system of right and wrong, but no evolved ethical tradition.
— R. Joseph Hoffmann
Few people can present a completely secular argument detailing why abusing toddlers is objectively wrong. But that hardly stops them from recognizing this moral truth even if they can't articulate their reasons in strictly secular terms.
— Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture
How can a man be still if he sees such a great wrong being instigated?''It's difficult, but it's necessary,' Professor While insisted. 'Science must go on unhindered, and if we bring politics into our work we will cease to be scientists.''Will we cease being human?' MacGregor demanded with the rudeness of justifying himself. 'Should we hand over our affairs to men we despise?''I suppose that is unanswerable.' Professor White was an deep into it now as MacGregor. 'But when we dabble in politics we suffer what you are suffering now, and it isn't worth it. Is it?''I don't know,' MacGregor said morosely.'Then why destroy yourself?' 'I don't believe a man has much choice any more,' MacGregor said. 'There seems to be some kind of a battle going on for any existence, science and all.''You may be right,' the Professor said. 'We are certainly facing a situation of terrible choice. Only yesterday the physicist chaps back from America brought in a petition to sign against control and secrecy of information and research in nuclear physics. Once they start on this secrecy business there is no telling where it will end. It was bad enough when we were working at Tennessee. We cannot have those ignorant politicians telling us what we must do.''They are already telling us what we must do,' MacGregor argued. 'The military control so much research that the phyusicist are becoming straight-out weapon makers and nothing else.''It's not the physicists' fault...''Then why don't they stop working for the military. Now they are talking about radio-active dust clouds and the biologists are producing concentrates of bacteria for wholesale disease-making. What's the matter with them? Have the Generals got them so scared that they meekly do as they are told?''Weapons are a part of life,' the Professor commented sadly, 'and since the politicians refuse to be peaceful, at least they ask for weapons and give us a chance we would not otherwise have of making enormous strides in costly research.''Perhaps. But don't we care how the products of our research are used?''You are looking for logic where there isn't any,' the Professor said. 'It isn't science which shapes the world, young man.''No sir, but we are part of it.''Really a very small part of it. The ultimate decision on human affairs lies outside science. We may be part of it, but if you are looking for the deciding factor in the shape of existence then I don't know where you'll find it.
— James Aldridge, The Diplomat
If moral truths do not exist as a foundation for law, then law itself becomes merely a system of raw political power accountable to no one.
— Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture
Don't always think about being a subordinate, otherwise you would lose your self esteem and not succeed in society.
— Saaif Alam
If you are always persuasive, you would be able to make new friends in society.
— Saaif Alam
Society will always do better where citizens have a belief in justice, honour and private morality. Where individuals are reduced to the satisfaction of personal appetites society will decline. The need to preserve society is at the very heart of conservatism and the absolute moral truths that are required for this preservation are not subject to change.
— Cory Bernardi, The Conservative Revolution
I have come to the conclusion that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin as we should or as our forefathers did.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.
— William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
And those who will carefully study the so-called 'Mosaic code' contained in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, will see that, though Jahveh's prohibitions of certain forms of immorality are strict and sweeping, his wrath is quite as strongly kindled against infractions of ritual ordinances. Accidental homicide may go unpunished, and reparation may be made for wilful theft. On the other hand, Nadab and Abihu, who 'offered strange fire before Jahveh, which he had not commanded them,' were swiftly devoured by Jahveh's fire; he who sacrificed anywhere except at the allotted place was to be 'cut off from his people'; so was he who ate blood; and the details of the upholstery of the Tabernacle, of the millinery of the priests' vestments, and of the cabinet work of the ark, can plead direct authority from Jahveh, no less than moral commands.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study
... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil
— Noam Chomsky
We need more moral compasses and less Sat Navs
— Dean Cavanagh
One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.
— Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.
— Stephen McAndrew, Why It Doesn't Matter What You Believe If It's Not True: Is There Absolute Truth?
Each of us would like the ability to do what we want to do, when we want to do it, without incurring the moral approbation of others. We, however, tend to conveniently forget this also gives others the right to do whatever they want.
— Stephen McAndrew, Why It Doesn't Matter What You Believe If It's Not True: Is There Absolute Truth?
When it comes to morals & principles, a man in the 'real' world has two options; compromise or wait for sometime and then compromise.
— Mohammad Rafiq Teli
Having personality does not mean being violent, rather honouring life by taking a stand. In this era so devoid of values, where people think it is safe to do everything that comes to mind, there is a need for purity. Man can and must have direction. Jews and Catholics must work together to help the man who suffers, and most importantly, look ahead.
— Abraham Skorka
The reason many are loathe to acknowledge the possibility of absolute truth is not simply because they do not wish to accept the possibility of the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing deity. It is because they do not want to accept the consequences that follow from the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing deity as the source of absolute moral truth.
— Stephen McAndrew, Why It Doesn't Matter What You Believe If It's Not True: Is There Absolute Truth?
And what does God ask of you?” “To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist between person and person, as flame goes from candle to candle. To know that all we can know of right or wrong is through the way our acts are revealed in the lives of other people. There is no other way to see God. It is not given to us.
— Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven: A Novel
We should always assist our friends and enemies in order to create a decent social environment.
— Saaif Alam
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
— William Stafford
Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.
— Mahavira
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
— Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation
Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Being a bad guy was easy, being a hero was hard.
— Dean Koontz, 77 Shadow Street
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
— Julian Huxley, Essays of a Humanist
Sandy fidgeted with his pen. “There’s something I didn’t write down. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, you being a judge and all, but, well, Jake Wexler… he’s a bookie.”No, he should not have told her. “A small-time operator, I’m sure, Mr. McSouthers,” the judge replied coldly. “It can have no bearing on the matter before us. Sam Westing manipulated people, cheated workers, bribed officials, stole ideas, but Sam Westing never smoked or drank or placed a bet. Give me a bookie any day over such a fine, upstanding, clean-living man.
— Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game
Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
— Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
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, Earthly Powers
Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.
— Christopher Hitchens
The fundamental characteristic of the scientific method is honesty. In dealing with any question, science asks no favors. ... I believe that constant use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress upon him who uses it. ... A life spent in accordance with scientific teachings would be of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings of the highest types of religion. The motives would be different, but so far as conduct is concerned the results would be practically identical.
— Ira Remsen
It’s not God who gave us moral laws, but this doesn’t make them less important
— Margherita Hack
Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman's doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with so much as half a word. All her life is symbolized in the only words which she knows in her dotage. Please do; and, God bless you.
— Halldór Laxness, The Atom Station
Paul Chehade is dedicated to serves the unfortunate, regardless of a person's religion, race, ethnicity, or gender, as a demonstration of God's unconditional love for all people, helping communities worldwide.Ethical junction making choices easy.
— Paul Chehade
Not only do I believe that it is possible to maintain moral standards without the crutch of religion—but I would argue that it is the only way to achieve true goodness and express real altruism. Free from the constraints of organized religion, a human being is able to express decency from one’s self—as opposed to attempting to appease whatever higher power he or she may believe in.
— David G. McAfee, Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings
We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the crimes of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad
—  it is the way they are used that determines their value.
It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.
— Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Some Christians say god is the source of morality, these people have clearly never read the bible.
— Gabriel Neil
What we now call "morality" was evolved – as nearly all social and physical human attributes were – to aid us in survival and, ultimately, reproduction. This morality requires only that we be guided by our developed conscience (or "moral sense") – and not a God or gods.
— David G. McAfee
It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality.
— Kelly J. Cogswell, Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger