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Morality Quotes
"Even if I believed I was doing good- for who I am to presume what is good for others?"
42
"Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why it has been said: 'Greed is the mother of incapacity'."
42
"But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!"
42
"You can believe that you are a good and caring person, but if you don't treat others with goodness and care, where is the proof?"
41
"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."
41
"He was a crystal of morality among our scientists."
41
"Tolerance is love sick with the sickness of haughtiness."
41
"Repeat a lie a hundred times and it becomes an ideal."
41
"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."
41
"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."
41
"Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right."
41
"Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?"
40
"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."
40
"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."
40
"Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to."
40
"The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age."
40
"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."
40
"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."
39
"None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married."
39
"As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness."
39
"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."
39
"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."
39
"Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, 'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys."
39
"If you are good, they say you are weak."
39
"The right to kill another person is not a right that I would agree with and support."
38
"No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care."
38
"There once was a kindly farmer who found a viper freezing on the ground in the snow. Please help me, the poor creature said, for I am too cold to live. The farmer took the viper and put it inside of his shirt, and the viper began to warm itself and come alive again. But upon coming alive, it bit the farmer most wretchedly, and as the farmer died, he asked the viper, but why? Why when I was so trusting of you?Because I am a viper, the snake replied. And one cannot expect kindness from evil."
38
"I'm not denying their kindness, said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue."
38
"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."
38
"Poverty Frost Famine Rain Disease are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense."
38
"They call good evil and evil good. There are those who are so easily offended that they lose their ability to ever discern any truth, and this is often derived from a sort of frenzy by way of their own masked prejudice."
38
"You should not judge, you should understand."
38
"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."
38
"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."
38
"The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher's knife."
38
"Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul."
37
"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."
37
"The death of dogma is the birth of morality."
37
"I do not think athletes should get a free pass. I don't think we should train our children and future athletes to believe that they are above the law and morality."
37
"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..."
37
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