Moral Quotes
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The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
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The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
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It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.
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A Keyes speech on the moral erosion of America is one of those transcendent experiences where you just have to be there. It's hard to explain how he touches the soul of an audience, and saying that he's 'silver-tongued' (as everyone does) only tarnishes the picture by inadequacy.
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President Obama was right to ban torture, but the public must understand that this decision carries a potential cost in lost information. That's what makes it a moral choice.
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A habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.
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Pop music is not just a clumsy mass fanaticism, connected to a deceitful enchantment totally lacking in moral rigour.
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In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.
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The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
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No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.
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I think optimism is a moral imperative.
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Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace - made me expect the worst.
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I think the problems with comedians that are political, and there are some brilliant ones, are the ones that offer no solutions. Not that there's a moral obligation for a comic to fix things, but I like to see a comic that's upset about something and offer a solution. It can be a funny solution. I like to see the thought process.
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Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.
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I think, like most people, my moral values tend to be pretty fuzzy.
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Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.
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Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing, [the Puritan] sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion ... but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.
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Mr. Speaker, the goal of stem cell research should be to help our fellow human beings. The debate on this issue has, unfortunately, moved into dangerous unethical territory when perfectly moral alternatives exist.
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Air forces offered the possibility of striking a the enemy's economic and moral centres without having first to achieve 'the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield'. Air-power might attain a direct end by indirect means - hopping over opposition instead of overthrowing it.
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I feel happy that twenty-five years of vicissitudes in my fortune, and firmness in my principles, warrant me in repeating here that if, to recover her rights, it is sufficient for a nation to resolve to do so, she can preserve them only by rigid fidelity to her civil and moral duties.
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Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price.
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Those of us who were lucky enough to be born in the right countries have a moral obligation to reduce poverty and ill health in the world.
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What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.
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In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.
