Morality Quotes - Page 3

• Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Inspirational Life, Integrity, Evil

  Albert Schweitzer (1932). “Civilization and ethics. 3d. ed”

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• Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Self, Independence, Lasts

  'Jane Eyre' (2nd ed., 1848) preface

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• Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.

  Horace Mann

  Apples, Law, Effort

  "The Albany Law Journal", Vol. XLIX, (p. 47), January - June 1894.

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• No moral system can rest solely on authority.

  A.J. Ayer

  Insightful, Authority, Moral

  Humanist Outlook (1968) introduction

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• Evangelical faith without Christian ethics is a travesty on the gospel.

  V. Raymond Edman

  Christian, Ethics, Evangelical

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• Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

  Stendhal

  Avarice Greed, Kind, Worst

  Stendhal (1950*). “Stendhal on Love”

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• To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

  Joseph Addison

  Religious, Religion, Facts

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• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Funny Friend, Drawing

  "The Golden Book" Magazine, Vol. 7, (p. 323), 1928.

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• What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.

  Havelock Ellis

  Atheism, Politics, Moral

  1923 The Dance of Life.

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• Morality is contraband in war.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Peace, War, Ethics

  Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (2007). “Gandhi on Non-Violence”, p.68, New Directions Publishing

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• Vanity of science. 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.

  Blaise Pascal

  Time, Ignorance, Knowledge

  c.1654-1662 Pense es, no.23.

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• The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Mistake, Struggle, Errors

  Friedrich Schiller (2012). “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, p.49, Courier Corporation

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• Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

  Thomas Szasz

  Meaningful, Anger, Responsibility

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1990). “The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary”, Open Court Publishing Company

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• There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.

  Walter Lippmann

  Ethics, Moral, Masquerade

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• There are three points of doctrine the belief of which forms the foundation of all morality. The first is the existence of God; the second is the immortality of the human soul; and the third is a future state of rewards and punishments. Suppose it possible for a man to disbelieve either of these three articles of faith and that man will have no conscience, he will have no other law than that of the tiger or the shark. The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy.

  John Quincy Adams

  Wise, Men, Sharks

  Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1848). “Letters of Mrs. Adams: The Wife of John Adams”, p.432, Boston, Wilkins, Carter,

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• I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.

  Lisa Randall

  Religious, Thinking, Afterlife

  Interview with Corey S. Powell, discovermagazine.com. July 29, 2006.

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• Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.

  Emile Durkheim

  Cheerful, Found, Appropriate

  Emile Durkheim (2005). “Suicide: A Study in Sociology”, p.333, Routledge

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• Morality is but the vestibule of religion.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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• What I have absolutely no sympathy with is the legislator, the man who seeks, for his own profit, to exploit the weaknesses of those who are unable to help themselves and then to fasten some moral superscription upon it. This I loathe so much that I cannot conceivably explain how much it is.

  Malcolm Lowry

  Men, Weakness, Helping

  Malcolm Lowry (1965). “Selected letters”

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• Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Ideas, Evil, Ideals

  1922 Fantasia of the Unconscious, ch.7.

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• Virtue is not a chemical product...it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key.

  Lewis Mumford

  Mean, Keys, Literature

  "Values for Survival". Essay by Lewis Mumford, 1946.

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• I don't want to know anything about your system of ethics. Strength is the morality of the man who stands out from the rest, and it is mine.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Men, Want, Ethics

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• There is nothing which strengthens faith more than the observance of morality.

  Joseph Addison

  Observance

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• A rational process is a moral process.

  Ayn Rand

  Reason, Process, Rational

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.102, Penguin

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• The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Education, Reading, Passion

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