Quotes About Morals

Morals aren't just for when it's easy, Anita. They aren't morals if you throw them aside every time it's convenient.

In such a performance you may lay the foundation of national happiness only in religion, not by leaving it doubtful "whether morals can exist without it," but by asserting that without religion morals are the effects of causes as purely physical as pleasant breezes and fruitful seasons.

People have their morals, but morals aren't concrete. People think because I'm a Muslim that I pray five times a day, but you're never going to see that on a day-to-day basis. People fluctuate. To me, that was the most specific way to put it, the best way to be like, "I listen to this music, but it's the most violent music on the planet." But I like it, and to make up for it, I don't say the cuss words. That's how I get away with it.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

Government has ceased to mean upholding and reinforcing the traditional rights and morals of the governed; it now means compulsion in the service of social engineering.

I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.

Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits . . . it is founded on morals and religion, whose authority reigns in the heart, and on the influence all these produce on public opinion before that opinion governs rulers.

If living by these sets of morals and principles and wanting to help better my land, better my country, my community, my team, my environment and helping the next person help themselves, if that's considered crazy, then I'm a crazy.

I think it's imperative to have faith or religion, because it's good to have morals, to be kind to others.

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?

Eagle rises to the top of the precipice with its wings; man, to the top of the honour, with his morals!

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

The civil liberty of every mode of worship, and full power given to all of openly and publicly manifesting their opinions and their ideas conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people... The Roman Pontiff cannot and ought not to reconcile himself or agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.

The talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer, and the manners of an undertaker.

Morals were too essential to the happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. Nature laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in science.

Sovereignty is easily preserved by the very arts by which it was originally created. When, however, energy has given place to indifference, and temperance and justice to passion and arrogance, then as the morals change so changes fortune.

If thou beest ever so exact in thy morals, and not a worshiper of God, then thou art an atheist.

Want of perseverance is the great fault of women in everything--morals, attention to health, friendship, and so on. It cannot be too often repeated that women never reach the end of anything through want of perseverance.

Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?-Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The passage from the realm of morals into the realm of religion is but a step; for the energy that we have found so persistent in the soul of man, urging him to purity, and service, and perfect love, is the same energy which, outside and above the soul of man, we name God.

First the grub, then the morals.

Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

I certainly don’t believe in religion, although I find it fascinating that it’s become so powerful in the world and it’s kind of dictated morals down through societies for thousands of years, but I don’t see the hand of God at work in the world anywhere.

One should make morals judgements for oneself.

A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal.

The American war is over; but this far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection.

Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.

Progress is a farce because man's head and hand have created wonders that stun the imagination, but his heart does not keep step and his morals undo all that his mind has wrought.

I'll never go against my morals.

All are agreed, that the increase of learning and good morals are great blessings to society.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

Morals do not come from the state and society. Morality deals with weightier matters that measure our thoughts, words, and deeds against universals that are true regardless of time and place.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, political, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.

When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes.

An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals.

Laws without morals are in vain.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

Good manners are a part of good morals.

That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

In writing, as in life, faults are endured without disgust when they are associated with transcendent merit, and may be sometimes recommended to weak judgments by the lustre which they obtain from their union with excellence; but it is the business of those who presume to superintend the taste or morals of mankind to separate delusive combinations, and distinguish that which may be praised from that which can only be excused.