MORALITY QUOTES IV

quotations about morality

Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous--dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

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Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Characteristics

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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

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Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations

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I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

LORD ACTON

The Study of History

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We should never doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step toward totalitarianism.

KENNETH MINOGUE

The Servile Mind, How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life


Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

BIBLE

Isaiah 5:20

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Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

KARL KRAUS

Morality and Criminal Justice

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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

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The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Sceptical Essays

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Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

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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?


Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

FROUDE

Short Studies on Great Subjects


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?


Morality is a private and costly luxury.

HENRY ADAMS

The Education of Henry Adams

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Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

H. L. MENCKEN

A Mencken Chrestomathy

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Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook B", Aphorisms

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The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line.

FROUDE

Short Studies on Great Subjects


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


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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