quotations about morality
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
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Kavanagh
Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist bestiality is moral, and nothing else.
LEON TROTSKY
Their Morals and Ours
Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous--dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The standard of morals is as variable as morals themselves; of which every nation has a different code, and every custom a different reading.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Morality is a bit like the laws of nature in that it exists outside me and I am subject to it. (Of course, it isn't always the case that I follow it, but that is another matter.) Or in a stronger way, morality is a bit like the laws of mathematics, because morality seems to be about the world, not of it.
MICHAEL RUSE
Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know?
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
H. L. MENCKEN
A Mencken Chrestomathy
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
We should never doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step toward totalitarianism.
KENNETH MINOGUE
The Servile Mind, How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Morality--like velocity--is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.
DAVID GERROLD
Star Hunt
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.
LORD ACTON
The Study of History
Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line.
FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
KARL KRAUS
Morality and Criminal Justice
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", Aphorisms