c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life – and being successful.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between good and evil, but maybe we should understand, as Zimbardo's work suggested, that evil is incremental - something we are all capable of, given the right circumstances.
— Shane Bauer
The world is going to turn upside down in a way that the honest man will live uncomfortably -- while the dishonest man will live very comfortably. Pay attention to the windows of the Four Seasons next time you stroll by their dining room. You will find thugs and hustlers of every creed living like true kings and queens.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Logic is not a sure enough defense against moral bankruptcy.
— Mark Sappenfield
Well, do you suppose I made up my mind then that what I had seen was something sickening? Not a bit of it. 'If it was done with such assurance and everyone thought it was necessary, then they must have known something I didn't,' was what I thought, and I tried to find out what it was. But I couldn't, no matter how hard I exerted myself. And since I couldn't, I couldn't join the army as I'd planned to, and not only did I not join the army, I couldn't find a place for myself anywhere in society, and ended up being no good for anything, as you can see.'Oh yes, we know all about how you're no good for anything,' said one of us, 'But tell us: how many men would be no good for anything if it weren't for the likes of you?
— Leo Tolstoy, After the Ball
Are guilt and regret not messages from inside of us, letting us know that our moral compasses have been recalibrated and are pointing in the right direction?
— Rhian J. Martin, A Different Familiar
Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.
— Abhijit Naskar, Illusion of Religion: A Treatise on Religious Fundamentalism
...[T]o be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often be very advantageous to me, although to abide by it is certainly safer.
— Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Do not judge to Anyone, Do not let anyone to judge you.But Every person must have little moral and honest to judge themselves.
— Mohammed Zaki Ansari, "Zaki's Gift Of Love"
To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction.
— Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
In Confucian thought, individuals practice moral virtue both by restraining themselves and pursuing their own interests. This is a dual push-and-pull process. In today’s China, the latter is taken care of by capitalism and commerce. The former, however, needs to be taken care of by the rule of law. Otherwise, the system of governance is corrupted by unrestrained individual desires and selective enforcement of ‘virtue’ or law.
— Patrick Mendis, Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order
And we remember that there must be a balance. No birth without death. No life without tears. What is taken from the world must be given back, and from him who takes and does not give back, who would tip the balance of the river, from him all will be taken. No one should live forever, but should give his blood to the river when the time comes so that tomorrow another may live. And so it goes.
— Jessica Khoury, Origin
Authority is not a substitute for truth.
— Jennifer McVeigh, Leopard at the Door
...I do not think that it is right for a man to appeal to the jury or to get himself acquitted by doing so; he ought to inform them of the facts and convince them by argument. The jury does not sit to dispense justice as a favour, but to decide where justice lies; and the oath which they have sworn is not to show favour at their own discretion, but to return a just and lawful verdict... Therefore you must not expect me, gentlemen, to behave towards you in a way which I consider neither reputable nor moral nor consistent with my religious duty.
— Socrates, Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When the law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same.
— Bastiat, Frederick, The Law
Morality is like the famous fig leaves that Adam and Eve used to cover their genitals after they first sinned. But what morality really covers up is will, which is our true nature.
— Shai Tubali
Stories are not real life, stories are pieces of morality made entertaining.
— Matthew Jarpe
Morally it may be better to not kill any creature for their flesh, but biologically, meat was one of the greatest factors involved in the rise of the psychology of thinking humanity.
— Abhijit Naskar, We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.
— Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you.
— Gabe Newell
The rule: when energy, 'negative' as it may be, moves without resistance, it easily sublimates and becomes raw energy of power and presence; resistance to it makes it freeze in its current state. For this reason, morality not only does not help our sexuality develop but also forces it to stay as it is.
— Shai Tubali, The Mystical Enlightenment of Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Death of God and the God Within
Think about goodness like you think about gravity. Whether or not you believe in gravity, it is still there. Every day you are affected by gravity regardless of how well you understand the physics of it. In this chapter I am asking whether objective morality is something like gravity operating in accordance with the laws of the universe. Are there some things that are always right and some things that are always wrong? Put another way, has there ever been a time in history where it would have been acceptable for Hitler to kill over five million Jews? Or is mass murder always wrong no matter when or where you are? If mass murder is always wrong, then it turns out that objective moral values and duties do exist.
— Jon Morrison, Clear Minds & Dirty Feet: A Reason to Hope, a Message to Share
The foundation of morality to have done, once and for all, with lying.
— Thomas H. Huxley
...she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine, but had instead, a firm reed of goodness.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition - that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by it in favor of any inclination, nay, even of the sum-total of all inclinations... like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself.
— Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
They want a hero to worship, and a villain to condemn. They have found their villain today, and they would cherish it for as long as they can, till another one comes along.
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
If a criminal was once a saint & a saint was once a criminal, then who is the criminal & who is the saint?
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
Greatness should have no victimsGreatness should need no victims.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
Animal rights are not a gift we give to animals. They are a birthright we have taken from them.
— Ryan Phillips
An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good.
— Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
Master morality is a "yea-saying" attitude where "good" and "bad" are equivalent to "noble" and "despicable" respectively.
— Philosophy.lander.edu
[A]ll mental disorders are in some sense passionate convictions about the situation of the self in the world.
— Alan A. Stone
The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.
— Noam Chomsky
Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were *right* and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions
— Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
— E.M. Forster, What I Believe and Other Essays
The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.
— Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
Any moral ethic worth examining must be universal. That is if something is right or wrong for me, it must also be right or wrong for you. This is a system of ethics that applies universally to all individuals regardless of culture, nationality, race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, wealth, or any other distinguishing feature. Otherwise, we would have difficulty judging human action.
— Daniel Alexander Brackins, Private Property, Law, and the State
Morality is part of man and it evolves over time just like the rest of humanity in accordance with Darwinian theory. If we said earlier that man’s evolution depends on change in the natural environment, now we must include the level of freedom of choice in that environment as a factor for change, for it is on this that the condition of morality depends.The higher the level of freedom of choice in society, the more liberal and humanistic that society’s morality will be.
— Karmak Bagisbayev, The Last Faith: A book by an atheist believer
Even though there is neither much altruism nor equality in the world, there is almost universal endorsement of the values of altruism and equality - even, notoriously (and as Nietzsche seemed well aware), by those who are is worst enemies in practice. So Nietzsche's critique is that a culture in the grips of MPS [Morality in the Pejorative Sense], even without acting on MPS, poses the real obstacle to flourishing, because it teaches potential higher types to disvalue what would be most conductive to their creativity and value what is irrelevant or perhaps even hostile to it.
— Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality
It's not respectable,' she said. And when people say that, it's no useanyone's saying anything.
— E. Nesbit, THE PSAMMEAD TRILOGY - The Magical Adventures of Five Friends (Illustrated): Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet & The Story of the Amulet
All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Unorganized morality is called sociability. Organized morality is called civilization. Unorganized immorality is called barbarity. Organized immorality is called statism.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
I know that it is dangerous. I also know that it is right.
— A.A. Frias, The Heaven Corporation
Lastly, people seemed to think that morality was the same thing as being politically correct, and it wasn't. Some of the most deeply moral people I knew were least politically correct, because they actually worried about good and evil, not just what they were told was good or bad.
— Laurell K. Hamilton
We haven't really got anything worth having for our wishes.''We've had things happening,' said Robert; 'that's always something.''It's not enough, unless they're the right things,' said Cyril firmly.
— E Nesbit, Five Children and It Illustrated Edition
That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise you can't be sure if you're safe.
— James Baldwin
I can never look at these apparent contradictions between the great laws of nature without a feeling of physical uneasiness which amounts to suffering. Were mankind reduced to the necessity of choosing between two parties, one of whom injures his interest, and the other his conscience, we should have nothing to hope from the future. Happily, this is not the case; and to see Aristus regain his economical superiority, as well as his moral superiority, it is sufficient to understand this consoling maxim, which is no less true from having a paradoxical appearance, “To save is to spend.
— Frédéric Bastiat, That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen
It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do.The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate--even maybe admiring.Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.
— Alden Bell, Exit Kingdom
The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.
— Paul C. Vitz, The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis
Something is objective if it is independent of people’s opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people’s opinions.
— William Lane Craig
To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense.
— William Lane Craig
The most popular form of atheism is a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism is the view that science and science alone determines what exists. What exists is what our best scientific theories of the world require. If something is not required by our best scientific theories of the world, then it does not exist. But this is devastating for ethics because moral values are not required by science. Science is morally neutral. You cannot find moral values in a test tube. So it follows immediately, from the perspective of naturalism, that moral values do not really exist. They are just subjective illusions of human beings.
— William Lane Craig
I saw that morality varies from person to person, from group to group, from nation to nation.And the most interesting thing is that when I began to study history, I realised that morality changes with time. Morality will even shift to its exact opposite when the conditions that once produced it yield to change.When a new set of circumstances appears it is the people with a highly developed sense of individual freedom of choice that first try to change the status quo. More conservative individuals with a less developed sense of freedom resist change for as long as possiblebut give up in the end. Man always has freedom of choice, unlike other creatures, who only change their way of life when they are forced to by the natural environment.Now I understand that the morality which is said to be inherent in God, or, as the atheists prefer to express it, in Nature, naively thinking that replacing the word ‘God’ with ‘Nature’ will make them sound more scientifically convincing, does not exist at all!
— Karmak Bagisbayev, The Last Faith: A book by an atheist believer
How exactly does ‘morality change in time’?”“Morality is part of man and it evolves over time just like the rest of humanity in accordance with Darwinian theory. If we said earlier that man’s evolution depends on change in the natural environment, now we must include the level of freedom of choice in that environment as a factor for change, for it is on this that the condition of morality depends.The higher the level of freedom of choice in society, the more liberal and humanistic that society’s morality will be.
— Karmak Bagisbayev, The Last Faith: A book by an atheist believer
. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
There are no good or evil people. There is only a great, unfathomable mob trampling itself underfoot. The life-giving sources of the old morality have dried up and vanished in the sands of oblivion. There's no other source to draw from, no place to refresh oneself. There is no example, no inspiration. It is night. A night of indifference, apathy, chaos.
— Tadeusz Konwicki
If, though full of respect for social conventions and never overstepping the bounds they draw round us, if, nonetheless, it should come to pass that the wicked tread upon flowers, will it not be decided that it is preferable to abandon oneself to the tide rather than to resist it? Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others?
— Marquis de Sade, Justine
At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality—law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally.
— Marquis de Sade, Justine
Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending on circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends on class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
You want to be good. All right, I can understand that. But you have to be careful who you let define your good.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
In the early stages the sexual needs will have the upper hand, in later stages the compulsive moralistic inhibition. At times of political upheavals of the total social organization, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality becomes most acute. This will impress some people as the "collapse of morality," other people as "sexual revolution." At any rate, the idea of the "decline of culture" is the perception of the breakthrough of natural sexuality. The only reason why it is experienced subjectively as "decline" is the fact that it threatens the compulsive moralistic way of living. What happens objectively is only the downfall of the sexual dictatorship which maintains the compulsive moralistic forces in the individuals in the interest of authoritarian marriage and family.
— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid
—  they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress—lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!
If you live long enough there's no line that you won't cross.
— Tracy Manaster, The Done Thing
I can see the common people, with their halo of self-defined morality (that changes conveniently based on needs), coin a term for me that I don’t quite approve of – Bitch.
— Kavipriya Moorthy, Dirty Martini
The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land.
— Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
The state of a moral man, is one of tranquillity and peace; the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest.
— Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors
Although profanity is part of our language that we speak everyday, it can simultaneity be used as a weapon to demoralize other people if it is offensive within its meaning.
— Saaif Alam
I was profoundly impressed by my contact with these places which are and have always been, the wellsprings of your history. It makes one think that the men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of "good" and "evil." Their practical policies were checked against their moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most farsighted and the most salutary. This is true even though in the short term one may wonder: Why all this morality? Let's just get on with the immediate job.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.
— Amanda Craig, A Vicious Circle
If an ordinary man can be tapped to be the Messiah...then perhaps any one of us is capable of bringing about the Redemption.
— Helen Maryles Shankman, In the Land of Armadillos: Stories
What else could I do? You couldn't just say no. I had to think about...my...position.
— Helen Maryles Shankman, In the Land of Armadillos: Stories
Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of 1876–7; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect! The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun. – Do you like the taste of our fruit? – But of what concern is that to the trees? And of what concern is it to us philosophers? . . .
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Our fights must be rooted in experiences, in stories, and in anecdotes. People remember these more than sterile numbers or facts. Myths are powerful magic and can turn enemies into friends. In a world where too many still tell stories that some are illegal and that to be free we must control the movement of others, the work of making new myths is essential.
— Syed Khalid Hussan, Undoing Border Imperialism
Do unto others' is a boomerang. Whatever you decide to throw out there will return to you. If you do not like what comes back - change your output.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
When greed transcends rationale, morality becomes irrelevant.
— Duop Chak Wuol
...It's not something shared with society, but rather its a personal possession. I've never thought that I wanted to share morality with someone. I feel it's like a white canvas on which nothing is yet drawn, a silent room which accepts any sounds of music and nature, a litmus paper that has not yet been dipped into a solution. In future, it will be a white canvas on which anyone should be allowed to draw anything.
— Ayako Sono, No Reason for Murder
The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it. Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.
— Joel Marks
People never fully confront their wrongdoing. They are all trying to push for their own ends, and they lack the strength to truly apologise for that. In my heart of hearts, I wondered if I was just the same.
— Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit
Doing the right thing is the surest path to public condemnation.
— Jeffrey Scott Jenkins
Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?
— Pierre Troubetzkoy
The weakness of our age is in want of great men and women. It is hard to resist the current. Someone must completely detach himself from the ordinary run of politicians if he is to save politics; economists must break with the ordinary run of the mill of capital and labor commonplaces, if economics is to be saved. In other words, we need saints. These are not easy to make. First of all - because we do not always want the best; the best demands sacrifice of the ordinary and the discipline of the lower self. God, in His turn, finds it hard to give, because He gives only the best - moral perfection - and few there are who want it. As Augustine said at one point in his life, "I want to be good, dear Lord...but not now - a little later on.
— Fulton Sheen
Morality says it all.Petra Hermans
— Petra Hermans
When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, “Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.” I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal nectarines.And if you protest against this view you are usually met with chatter about the legitimacy and beauty and sanctity of “sex” and accused of harboring some Puritan prejudice against it as something disreputable or shameful. I deny the charge. Foam-born Venus … golden Aphrodite … Our Lady of Cyprus… I never breathed a word against you. If I object to boys who steal my nectarines, must I be supposed to disapprove of nectarines in general? Or even of boys in general? It might, you know, be stealing that I disapproved of.
— C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
no doubt that evil is more contagious than good, therefore, it's more powerful.
— Anonymous
Like other corrupt people, he would never realize that his punishment was in missing out on what he didn’t know he could have.
— Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit
And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched him as he watched, gazing where he should not.
— Emmanuelle de Maupassant, Cautionary Tales: Voices from the Edges
It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.
— H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
The bottom line, as Raul Hilberg put it, was that most people thought that, even if Jews shouldn't be killed, they weren't worth saving.
— Victoria J. Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust
...the one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts.
— David Weber, The Honor of the Queen
The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.
— Algis Valiunas
Leave it to the Alderaanians to slap a cheery end on a nice little grisly children’s morality tale.
— Timothy Zahn, Choices of One
Audiences who behave obscene toward prominent people have no clue that their opinions can result others to have a bad impression on them.
— Saaif Alam
We who are beyond the mortal world see many things from the edges
—  we hear the subtle shifts of rhythm in the beat of a blackening heart.
The moment you hand over YOUR responsibility to manage your own rights, morality, and freedoms - to the government, that is the moment democracy fails.
— Christina Engela, Black Sunrise
I swear to use my scientific knowledge for the good of Humanity. I promise never to harm any person in my search for enlightenment.I shall be courageous and careful in my quest for greater knowledge about the mysteries that surround us. I shall not use scientific knowledge for my own personal gain or give it to those who seek to destroy the wonderful planet on which we live.If I break this oath, may the beauty and wonder of the Universe forever remain hidden from me.
— Stephen Hawking, George's Secret Key to the Universe
...we know there's a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the slime. It's the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions on front of you. And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night...and what your dreams are like.
— Stephen King, Different Seasons
It is quite ironic that those calling the loudest for 'morality' are typically the most immoral of all.
— Christina Engela, Demonspawn
In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia.One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War.The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets.Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses:Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types.On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge.Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
The sexual license prevalent among {the} Sixties generation was deplorable, but no more so than predatory Capitalism, with cruel slums alongsideabsurd affluence: affluence which paid for...depictions of the Holy Family as a form of expiation. Love was the basis for what he believed. Promiscuity certainly violated that polestar, yet caring for others, even in "fooling around"--which was not to justify it--topped dog-eat-dog Capitalism.
— Edward Hoagland, In the Country of the Blind: A Novel
what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves
— José Saramago, Blindness
Most men who very seldom say a moral thing, very seldom do a wrong thing. Their immorality is simply a pose, an image that serves to differentiate them from the ‘morally perfect masses’. And as opposite to it, most men who very frequently say a moral thing, very frequently do a wrong thing. Their morality is simply a mask in order to gain the respect of the masses.
— Elmar Hussein
We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.
— Hierocles
Always polish the dirt for a refreshing start and seek out to build new mental structures that can help you to become rejuvenated.
— Saaif Alam
I appreciate life so much after I see people die. It is always just such a reminder that every moment -- this is all we have. This is it. I don't know if there is anything before or after, but this is what we do know. This is it. There are no guarantees for anything else. So we have to always, always appreciate.
— Phil Zuckerman
Mankind's first sin gave us the ability to know both good and evil. Our subsequent sins make us increasingly unable to tell the difference.
— Ron Brackin
Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: ‘Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Part of the Maoist project was the deliberate construction of a new moral identity. To do this it was necessary to destroy people’s previous sense of who they were and to make sure there was no room for it grow back.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
In recent philosophy there has been a growing awareness of the gap between the abstract principles proposed by philosophers and the ways in which people actually think. The kind of rationality admired in the theory of knowledge is idealization. In the real world people have to act on beliefs often based on fragmentary and unreliable evidence.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Now I realize, of course, that many readers will acknowledge that we do in fact have these reactions, but would nevertheless write them off as mere reactions. “Our tendency to find something personally disgusting,” they will sniff, “doesn’t show that there is anything objectively wrong with it.” This is the sort of stupidity-masquerading-as-insight that absolutely pervades modern intellectual life, and it has the same source as so many other contemporary intellectual pathologies: the abandonment of the classical realism of the great Greek and Scholastic philosophers, and especially of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes.
— Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism
Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished
—  the others can only be hurt.
Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.
— H.L. Mencken
Morality is what the queen expects from the hive, not from herself.
— Marty Rubin
Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.
— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica
If i am asked 'what is good? my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it
— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica
We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Secret of man's Mortality
—  Man has transformed from immortal to become a mere mortal being all because of our mental love for sex and evil.
Atrocities are easier to commit if respect for the victim can be neutralized. For this reason, humiliation handed out by those with power can be ominous. The link between humiliation and atrocity is often found.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
When we observe oppression, let us develop strategies that free not only the oppressed but also the oppressor. Let us remember that those who use their power to deny freedom to others are also imprisoned and are also worthy of care. Do not let their unjust actions inspire us to cruelty, or else we will soon become what we set out against.Here is our challenge: let us take up the miseducation of justice-making, by stripping our minds of the idea that equity can be manifested through condemnation, through humiliation, through shame and blame, and through righteous vindication. No, justice-making begins by marrying a just thought to insightful words, inviting us to collective action, by daring to free both the oppressed and the oppressor, for we know what it is like to be both.Stand we must, stand strong and bold. But let us choose a new way to balance the scales. Rather than shoving our foot on oppressors’ necks, let us instead reach out a hand, offer a seat, and show them, and even ourselves, a new way of justice-making by collectively experimenting with the moral imagination.
— Nathan C. Walker, Cultivating Empathy: The Worth and Dignity of Every Person-Without Exception
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The young now approached love in the way they approached success and consumption and the future itself: with an underlying assumption of abundance. They expected more out of love than earlier generations did and were willing to fight to secure it, but when it failed they were equally at ease in walking away. It was one strike and you're out. They rejected the moral vocabulary of an older generation: patience, tolerance, adjustment.
— Anand Giridharadas, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking
...if good is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such definition.
— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica
Good, then, is indefinable....
— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica
For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them.
— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica