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Morality Quotes
"Virtue is imaginative. Evil, repetitive."
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"Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right."
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"The visual of Satan isn't one of a big red devil with horns. Even worse, it's the picture of something good, twisted enough to be compelling."
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"There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire."
51
"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."
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"I'm not denying their kindness, said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue."
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"If you are good, they say you are weak."
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"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses."
50
"The one thing I have learned as a CEO is that leadership at various levels is vastly different. When I was leading a function or a business, there were certain demands and requirements to be a leader. As you move up the organization, the requirements for leading that organization don't grow vertically; they grow exponentially."
50
"My parents were pretty lenient with me. But, they gave me morality while I was growing up. They taught me the difference between right and wrong."
50
"Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why it has been said: 'Greed is the mother of incapacity'."
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"The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie."
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"You accused me of murder. Do you make a habit of bringing schoolgirls into an interview room with murder suspects?' He waved his hand. 'Oh, I was only joking about that. I don't really think you murdered someone. Unless you did, in which case I reserve the right to say I knew it all along."
49
"As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness."
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"Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good."
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"When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie."
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"Our values define who we're. Never met great persons who kept compromising their values. Let's go beyond lip service to defend our values..."
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"Feeling important is a vice, not a virtue, however concealed as participation in something noble."
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"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."
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"People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality."
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"Don't forgive people until they understand their mistakes."
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"I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from."
49
"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."
49
"The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher's knife."
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"None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married."
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"A forced kindness deserves no thanks."
48
"No man is more cheated than the selfish man."
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"We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill."
48
"To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny."
47
"The death of dogma is the birth of morality."
47
"There's always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn't get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There's always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can't eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That's when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top."
47
"No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care."
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"Tolerance is love sick with the sickness of haughtiness."
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"It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion."
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"Repeat a lie a hundred times and it becomes an ideal."
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"How shall a man judge what to do in such times?''As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear...It is a man's part to discern them, as much in th Golden Wood as in his own house."
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"It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."
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"Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death."
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