MORALITY QUOTES V

quotations about morality

Morality does not derive its nature from books, but from the fitness of things.

ETHAN ALLEN

Reason: The Only Oracle of Man

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Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

ELBERT HUBBARD

The American Bible

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We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory.

JANE ADDAMS

Democracy and Social Ethics

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Neither the home, nor the churches, nor the communities have stopped teaching morality for a moment. What has happened during the last half century or so is that some of this teaching has become confused, contradictory, uncertain. Also, its contents have become very different from what an unexamined popular voice still calls the moral virtues. One result is that children nowadays are exposed to a teaching of widely divergent values, compared to a still recent era when those taught by home, church, community, and school were one and the same.

BRUNO BETTELHEIM

Moral Education: Five Lectures

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All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

VOLTAIRE

attributed, Day's Collacon

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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

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Almost every Englishman imagines he is moral because he objects to immorality--in others.

CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM

The Maxims of Marmaduke

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There is nothing ... quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It's easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark.

CASSANDRA CLARE

City of Bones

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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

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The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?

C. G. JUNG

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Tags: Carl Jung


There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

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Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

Islanders and the Fisher of Men

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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

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People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality.

FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL

Philosophical Fragments


The system of morality which Socrates made it the business of his life to teach was raised upon the firm basis of religion. The first principles of virtuous conduct which are common to all mankind are, according to this excellent moralist, laws of God; and the conclusive argument by which he supports this opinion is, that no man departs from these principles with impunity.

WILLIAM ENFIELD

The History of Philosophy


He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD.

SOLOMON

Proverbs 17:15


Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

"The Science of History", Representative Essays, February 5, 1864

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It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.

EMMA GOLDMAN

"Victims of Morality", Mother Earth, March 1913

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Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

SIGMUND FREUD

The Future of an Illusion

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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

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