Quotes About Morality

Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.

Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality - it's just a different morality than the loud voices of the Christian morality.... I can't tell you how many films I've turned down because there was an absence of morality. And I don't mean that from any sort of Judeo-Christian-Muslim point of view. I'm not saying they're wrong and can't be made. But, fundamentally, I'm such a humanist that I can't bear to make films that make us feel humanity is more dark than it is light.

How can you construct a morality if there's no morality inherent in the way things are? You might be able to delude yourself into thinking you had 'created' a morality, but that's all it would be, an illusion.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.

Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.

Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of human condition. No, they proclaimed morality was an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable

It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.

You're damn right we need a rational code of morality and ethics. But not much progress can be made in that direction while we've still got a majority ranting about gods, devils, souls, and absolute morality, and using an ancient book written by ignorant nomads as a guide.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

If anyone tells you that you cannot legislate morality, remeber that legislation IS morality.

The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government.

Obviously, marriage is not a synonym for morality. But stable marriages and families do encourage moral behavior.

Know that morality is a curb, not a spur.

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

Morality is the struggle of the bound will to get free and is the proof that we have come from perfection. . . .

Leadership, in short, is power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods. They need but common sense. They have only to look within themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consult their obvious interests, to consider the object of society and of each of the members who compose it, and they will easily understand that virtue is an advantage, and that vice is an injury to beings of the species.

The morality of the 21st century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value simply and merely because it is human?

Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.

A person must have a good memory to keep the promises he has made. A person must have a strong imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality tied to the quality of the intellect.

True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.

Boy lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers... are not child molesters. The child abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and parents who force their staid morality onto the young people in their custody.

We hear a lot of talk these days about teaching values in higher education. Frankly, I am not sure this can be accomplished through a separate course in morality or ethics. I am convinced, however, that values are sustained on campus by the honesty of our words, and by the confidence we have in the words of others.

The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. ... The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard them from the consequences of their vices.

People are so phobic and crazed about this word 'commitment.' It's weird. Everyone has taken this word to a new height of morality.

Lawyers, before any other group, must continue to point out how the system is really working-how it actually affects real people. They must constantly demonstrate to courts and legislatures alike the tragic results of legal nonintervention. They must highlight how legal doctrines no longer bear any relation to reality, whether in landlord and tenant law, holder in due course law, or any other law. In sum, lawyers must bring real morality into the legal consciousness

Whatever others think or do, lower not your standard of purity, morality and love of God.

If Darwinism is true, then there is no purpose or meaning to life, there is no morality, there's no qualitative difference between humans and animals, there's no life after death, and there's no purpose to human history. Now, are you trying to tell me that it doesn't really matter if people believe we evolved or not?

It makes me upset, if not angry, when people assume that there can be no morality without a religious framework. If there's a moral framework without all that religious stuff, it's more valuable.

These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.

Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.

We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

The web of hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies.

Man can learn self-discipline without becoming ascetic; he can be wise without waiting to be old; he can be influential without waiting for status. Man can sharpen his ability to distinguish between matters of principle and matters of preference, but only if we have a wise interplay between time and truth, between minutes and morality.

There is no morality without temptation; otherwise it is just lack of opportunity.

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.

Ideals and morality are often spoken of as virtual antimatter to the behaviors allegedly needed to maximize profits.

Having killed God, the atheist is left with no reason for being, no morality to espouse, no meaning to life, and no hope beyond the grave.

I believe that while art is always beyond morality, it is never above it.