quotations about morality
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
Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist bestiality is moral, and nothing else.
LEON TROTSKY
Their Morals and Ours
Ethics and I had crossed paths recently, and I'm not sure that I fell on the right side of the morality line.
S. C. STEPHENS
Effortless
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Kavanagh
Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on signs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
Moral progress is a process of isolation; the mountain tops are lonely.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", Aphorisms
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 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?
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
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?
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
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
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 a private and costly luxury.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
It is the dutiful disposition of each person to spread morality outside of himself to the best of his ability and knowledge, i.e., to see to it that everyone has the same disposition he has ... It follows from this that the overall end of the moral community as a whole is to produce unanimity concerning matters of morality.
JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE
The System of Ethics: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre