Morality Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.

George Washington

As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.

Savage – There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. If I fling half a crown to a beggar with intention to break his head and he picks it up and buy victuals with it, the physical effect is good. But with respect to me the action is very wrong.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

Henry David Thoreau

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

What marriage is to morality, a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety.

The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions … I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

In order for once to get a glimpse of our European morality from a distance, in order to compare it with other earlier or future moralities, one must do as the traveller who wants to know the height of the towers of a city: he leaves the city.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one's neighbor.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

Bertrand Russell

I'm one of the undeserving poor…up agen middle-class morality all the time…What is middle-class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

George Bernard Shaw

Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

George Washington

Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

Conservation is not merely a question of morality, but a question of our own survival.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

One observes, they have gone too long without a war here. Where is morality to come from in such a case, I ask? Peace is nothing but slovenliness, only war creates order.

Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

Bertrand Russell

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves.