quotations about morality
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
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
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
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
BIBLE
Isaiah 5:20
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
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
Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Sceptical Essays
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, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
Morality is necessary for our flourishing as humans, not because it is a disguised form of egoism, but because to flourish as humans is to live well together in communities.
DAVID FISHER
Morality and War: Can War Be Just in the Twenty-first Century?
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", Aphorisms
I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true.... If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.
LISA RANDALL
Discover Magazine, July 2006
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible