quotations about morality
To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
The main objection to absolute morality is that even if there were absolute moral standards we should have no way of knowing whether we had found them.
WALTER KAUFMANN
The Faith of the Heretic
The important thing about morality is its spirit, its underlying aims, and the general picture of ethical life it implies.
BERNARD WILLIAMS
"Morality, the Peculiar Institution", Virtue Ethics
Bad company ruins good morals.
PAUL OF TARSUS
1 Corinthians 15:33
Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
EMILE DURKHEIM
Suicide
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation
Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
The Fatal Conceit
There's nothing that throws off your moral compass like love.
RAMSEY SHEHADEH
"The Diner on the Edge of Hell", Weird Tales, Summer 2011
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy
Those kinds of morals and that kind of religion which tend to make the firmest and most effectual character are sure to prevail, all else being the same; and creeds or systems that conduce to a soft limp mind tend to perish, except some hard extrinsic force keep them alive.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
JANE ADDAMS
attributed, Reader's Digest Quotable Quotes
All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
letter to Mr. B., March 27, 1848
Morality is a visible indicator of human culture, a mirror of the nature of individuals and peoples.
DIMITAR STANKOV
"The Moral Culture of the Person", Morality and public life in a time of change
In cases of doubtful morality, it is usual to say is there any harm in doing this? This question may sometimes be best answered by asking ourselves another; is there any harm in letting it alone?
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Morality is but the vestibule of religion.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.
H. L. MENCKEN
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.
MICHAEL SHERMER
The Science of Good and Evil
In the slow but general moral advance certain men lag a little behind the rate if progress of the community as a whole; and where their own real or fancied interests are concerned, such men fail to recognize generally accepted standards of right and wrong until long after they have been recognized by the majority of their fellows.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
speech at Progressive Party Convention, Chicago, Illinois, June 17, 1912
The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Fanny's First Play