Morality Quotes

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.'

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

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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.

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.

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.

I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations.

Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?

In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior.

The new morality does not consist in saving but in expanding consumption.

Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth

Admittedly, the tendency to bracket substantive moral questions makes it difficult to argue for toleration in the language of the good. Defining privacy rights by defending the practices privacy protects seems either reckless or quaint; reckless because it rests so much on moral argument, quaint because it recalls the traditional view that ties the case for privacy to the merits of the conduct privacy protects. But as the abortion and sodomy cases illustrate, the attempt to bracket moral questions faces difficulties of its own. They suggest the truth in the "naive" view, that the justice or injustice of laws against abortion and homosexual sodomy may have something to do with the morality or immorality of these practices after all.

Michael J. Sandel

Fantasy, by its power to move us so deeply, to dramatize, even melo-dramatize, morality, can be one of the most effective means of establishing a capacity for adult values.

Lloyd Alexander

Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.

Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.

'There are standards of immorality as well as standards of morality, Robert. Make sure yours are high.'

Stirner and Nietzsche … reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue.

And they drank heavily, partied with great enthusiasm, and relished the drug culture; they moved in and out and slept around, and this was okay because they defined their own morality. They were fighting for the Mexicans and the redwoods, dammit! They had to be good people!

My view [is] that what morality boils down to is, Don't harm, and do help. And now the question is, Can creatures like chickens and cows be harmed? And the answer is, Of course they can. Consequently, I think it's immoral to harm them. And that seems to me to provide a very strong moral reason to be vegetarian, to not wear leather... it seems to me that our treatment of animals is morally appalling... and that we ought to radically revise the way we live, precisely because they feel pain, they can be hurt, and we're constantly hurting these creatures!

This is insane, she said. Why would mortals make it so difficult to get two little glasses of white wine?
Human nature, my love. Edward grinned and set his knee against hers under the tablecloth. The desire of a few to dictate morality to the whole. And why do the masses submit willingly? Apathy. Or, perhaps, the opportunity to experience the thrill of the forbidden!