Moral Quotes
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If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn't show systematic change over human history. But they do.
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In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help.
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Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
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If you're a teacher you have to teach the curriculum, all that stuff, you have to teach morals, you have to teach values, and you have to teach, all-importantly, self-control. Because a lot of kids don't have it.
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If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution.
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Purity of morals is the only sure foundation of public happiness in any country.
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I like playing complex, interesting characters. Sometimes I don't think there's much of a strong line between right and wrong for a character. Every character is somewhere on a moral spectrum.
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Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives.
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When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated.
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A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse.
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That Newt Gingrich or any mainstream Republican has the nerve to look down from what they perceive as their moral mountaintop at anyone is laughable.
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I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.
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I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.
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A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.
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Nothing is more private than a woman's body; it is her physical, emotional, and moral citadel. She cannot be free at all if she is not free to decide for herself, in private, what to do with her body.
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Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.
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Abstract systems depend on trust, yet they provide none of the moral rewards which can be obtained from personalised trust, or were often available in traditional settings from the moral frameworks within which everyday life was undertaken. Moreover, the wholesale penetration of abstract systems into daily life creates risks which the individual is not well placed to confront; high-consequence risks fall into this category. Greater interdependence, up to and including globally independent systems, means greater vulnerability when untoward events occur that affect those systems as a whole.
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George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
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The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.
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When I was young, I had a very clear point of view on things in life, on moral questions. There was a black and white viewpoint on my world. As I've gotten older, I see the grey areas appear.
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There is a radical dualism between the empirical nature of man and its moral nature
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Except here it's more power, more energy, younger and also in Europe it's still not only entertainment. Theater or films are looked at as a moral institution. That's why maybe they're so poetic. Here it's clear entertainment.
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When we're in our right minds, we are hopeful. Because the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, nature does bend toward healing, and the heart does bend toward love.
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The city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion.
