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.

Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one.

What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

I believe in good, having morals, be a decent person.

You have an interesting set of morals," he observed. "Breaking out of jail is okay. But steal a car, and you sound totally outraged.

It is a common teaching of the Saints that one of the principal means of leading a good and exemplary life is certainly modesty and the mortification of the eyes. Just as there is nothing better than modesty to preserve devotion in a soul and to edify one's neighbor, so too, there is nothing worse than immodesty and licentious glances to expose a person to the danger of becoming lax and loose in morals.

In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

People who expect to feel guilty tend to be more sympathetic, to put themselves into other people's shoes, to think about the consequences of their behaviour before acting, and to treasure their morals. As a result they are less prone to lie, cheat or behave immorally when they conduct a business deal or spot an opportunity to make money, studies suggest. They are also likely to make better employees because people who think less about the future results of their actions are more likely to be late, to steal or to be rude to clients.

On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.

The union is much more than me, and when you think the union is you and it's not about who you represent, I think you've sort of lost your morals and focus and the purpose of your leadership.

The journalist should be on his guard against publishing what is false in taste or exceptionable in morals.

Those sciences which govern the morals of mankind, such as Theology and Philosophy, make everything their concern: no activity is so private or so secret as to escape their attention or their jurisdiction.

We don't have politicians with dignity and morals. We never have, not since [Nelson] Mandela and [Mahatma ] Gandhi. It's really rare.

The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain.

Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal" which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

Bad company ruins good morals.

The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.

Let's stand up. Let's speak with pride about our morals and our values and redouble our effort to elect more conservative Republicans.

I'm not physically harming any of these people by being high, and it's just interesting to see that I feel like my values and morals don't change at all when I'm high, but that's a constant. The thing that changes when I'm high is I am happier, and I'm not good with numbers.

....shellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adaptation of an extravagant lifestyle.

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.

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.

Whatever may be the laws and customs of a country, women always give the tone to morals. Whether slaves or free, they reign, because their empire is that of the affections.

I have a strong Lutheran background, and my parents instilled in me strong morals.

I'll never go against my morals.

One of the evils of paper money is that it turns the whole country into stock jobbers. The precariousness of its value and the uncertainty of its fate continually operate, night and day, to produce this destructive effect. Having no real value in itself it depends for support upon accident, caprice, and party; and as it is the interest of some to depreciate and of others to raise its value, there is a continual invention going on that destroys the morals of the country.

We cannot assume the injustice of any actions which only create offense, and especially as regards religion and morals. He who utters or does anything to wound the conscience and moral sense of others, may indeed act immorally; but, so long as he is not guilty of being importunate, he violates no right.

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

The Jew is not satisfied with de-Christianizing, he Judiazizes, he destroys the Catholic or Protestant faith, he provokes indifference but he imposes his idea of the world of morals and of life upon those whose faith he ruins. He works at his age old task, the annilation of the religion of Christ.

The health of a community is an almost unfailing index of its morals.

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the meaning of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

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.

A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion; he may be learning not to live but to reason... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed.

You can't make everyone happy no matter what. All I can do is live my life and try to be successful and please myself. I have my own morals I live by. Bill Cosby once said, 'I don't know the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.' I agree with that. I live my life my way. I try to do the right thing, but I know there are going to be people who aren't happy with what I do or say no matter what, so I'm not going to worry about it.

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.

I think it's important to raise your kids, start 'em early. Teaching them the values and morals, so when they get out there on their own, you know they have it. They just have to remember to use it, but they have it.

Keep your libraries, your penal institutions, your insaneasylums... give me beer.You think man needs rule, he needs beer. The world does not need morals, it needs beer... The souls of men have been fed with indigestibles, but the soul could make use of beer.

Never choose the easy path. Choose the one that has morals

Priestly was the first (unless it was Becarria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth--that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Religion is the solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man toward God.