Morality Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Young people know less than we do, but they understand more; their perception has not yet been blunted by compromise, fatigue, rationalization, and the mistaking of mere respectability for morality.

Sydney J. Harris

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, … but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free.

Anybody who claims that people don't cherry-pick their morality from the Bible, choosing that which comports with their extra-Biblical notions of what's good and bad, is simply blind.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

'Perhaps it is the human imagination that is the monster,' he said. 'I believe no animal suffers from the torments of the imagination. Only man…'
'The imagination is capable of enacting the very best in us, and the very worst,' agreed Hor, 'and I know what mine would like to do to some people.'
'Your verse is torment enough,' quipped the architect.
'And that is why civilized life, morality, ethics and so on, matter. We are half-enlightened, and half-monstrous,' said Nakht assertively. 'We must build our civility upon reason and mutual benefit.'
Sobek raised his cup.
'I salute your reason. I wish it every success.'

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

The divine element manifests itself in man as well by his aptitude for science, than by his aptitude for virtue. True morality, true philosophy and true art are in their essence religious.

Religion as such is advantageous for human kind. People became religious in the progress of evolution. Although it is believed that it is religion that teaches us what's right and what's wrong, I think religion evolved to substantiate our morality. Brain likes to validate our beheviors.

In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period.

The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Albert Schweitzer

Republicans stand by their convictions. Stupid, ignorant, world-destroying convictions based on disproven economic fantasies and ancient books full of primitive morality and magic people. But convictions, nonetheless.

We must face the reality that the enemies offer: what's really happening in the human world is politics, or morality, or religion, or aesthetics. This confrontation with reality is totally different from the rational approach, because the reality of the enemies cannot be conceptualized, approximated, or measured.

C. West Churchman

I don't know much about morality and that, but there is this: It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.

John Galsworthy

Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.

Robert A. Heinlein

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily […] to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds. You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed.

Charles Krauthammer

Let us imagine that an absolutely unbiased investigator on another planet, perhaps on Mars, is examining human behavior on earth, with the aid of a telescope whose magnification is too small to enable him to discern individuals and follow their separate behavior, but large enough for him to observe occurrences such as migrations of peoples, wars, and similar great historical events. He would never gain the impression that human behavior was dictated by intelligence, still less by responsible morality.

At exactly the time when the fatal knowledge of how to destroy the entire human race has fallen forever into out hands, the knowledge of morality has fallen out.

A genius has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of imprudence.

You have your way of life, we ours. In your system of life we are essentially without 'honor.' In our system of life you are essentially without morality. In your system of life we must forever appear graceless; to us you must forever appear godless.

I'm developing cross platform now, and I'm as interested in helping as many people as possible to have a better experience when using computers. Morality demands that I write for Wintel machines first (Linux comes along free), and port to Macs when there is time.

Religion is not simply a theory, it is a higher life, of which morality is an integral part - a life devoted to the worship of the good and the true, for God, the absolute, is the supreme source of all perfection.