Morality Quotes

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Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

Instinctively we divide mankind into friends and foes - friends, towards whom we have the morality of co-operation; foes, towards whom we have that of competition. But this division is constantly changing; at one moment a man hates his business competitor, at another, when both are threatened by Socialism or by an external enemy, he suddenly begins to view him as a brother. Always when we pass beyond the limits of the family it is the external enemy which supplies the cohesive force. In times of safety we can afford to hate our neighbour, but in times of danger we must love him.

Bertrand Russell

When we come to the moral principles on which the government is to be administered, we come to what is proper for all conditions of society. Liberty, truth, probity, honor, are declared to be the four cardinal principles of society. I believe that morality, compassion, generosity, are innate elements of the human constitution; that there exists a right independent of force.

Thomas Jefferson

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

George Bernard Shaw

Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

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.

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

Bertrand Russell

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.

In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Bertrand Russell

When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.

Thomas Jefferson

Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
This personal morality may appear to be immorality itself in the eyes of those who lie to themselves, or who live a life of confusion, in such a manner that, for them, a lie becomes the truth, and our truth becomes a lie...

The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life - and being successful.

Friedrich Nietzsche

True eloquence takes no heed of eloquence, true morality takes no heed of morality.

Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality, and the preeminence of free government be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its citizens, and command the respect of the world.

George Washington