Morality Quotes

Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.

All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.

Do your duty as you see it, and damn the consequences.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.

War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier, if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel.

To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage, or of principle.

Our cup will truly run over only after we have sealed the character cracks.

I would rather have India reduced to a state of pauperism than have thousands of drunkards in our midst.

Humility, a sense of reverence before the sons of heaven - of all the prizes that a mortal man might win, these, I say, are wisest; these are best.

The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has any conscience but the man who thinks

If our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.

Justice extorts no reward, no kind of price; she is sought, therefore, for her own sake.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

If we suddenly plant our foot, and say, - I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must not cease to tend to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day.

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.

Morally speaking, we should be concerned for our whole environment.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

Don't do anything that goes against your conscience, even if your country says so.

If principle is good for anything, it is worth living up to.

[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

The motto of war is: "Let the strong survive; let the weak die." The motto of peace is: "Let the strong help the weak to survive."

All I know of morality I learned from football

If the situation was such that there was only one learned lama or genuine practitioner alive, a person whose death would cause the whole of Tibet to lose all hope of keeping its Buddhist way of life, then it is conceivable that in order to protect that one person it might be justified for one or 10 enemies to be eliminated if there was no other way.

My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.

I presume that you are compassionate: to be without pity means to be sick in body and spirit. But one should have spirit in abundance, so as to be permitted to be compassionate! For your pity is detrimental to you and to everyone.

Greed is merely a species of nearsightedness.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.

For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

If one asks the whence derives the authority of fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence.

I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.

The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.

A slave has not the freedom even to do the right thing.

Woe to the man who offends a small child!

Greed makes man blind and foolish, and makes him an easy prey for death.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.

Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity.

When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.

Let every man consider virtue as what devolves on himself. He may not yield the performance of it even to his teacher.

Man is sent into the world to perform his duty even at the cost of his life.

In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.

In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.

Don't make to others what you don't want them to make to you.

I am a stronger follower of Veganism by principle, not just because of moral and aesthetic reasons. I truly believe in a Vegetarian lifestyle and I have faith and hopes in change in human destiny, thanks to the physical effects and benefits of a healthier diet and its influence on the character of the people. It will bring about some benefit and improvement to human society.

To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.

This is not a time to keep the facts from the people-to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

When Knaves betray each other, one can scarce be blamed or the other pitied.

A little integrity is better than any career.