Moralist Quotes - Page 2

• If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

  Russell Kirk

  Order, Soul, Want

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• Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

  Russell Kirk

  Inspirational, Change, Men

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.274, Regnery Publishing

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• If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Tasks, Addresses

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

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• It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Powerful, Self, Deception

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2011). “The Will to Power”, p.340, Vintage

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• The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.

  Robert Payne

  Found, Good Moral

  Robert Payne (1975). “The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America”, Praeger Publishers

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• For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy

  Bertrand Russell

  Years, Two, Morality

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.120, Routledge

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• Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?

  Quentin Crisp

  Block, Lying, People

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.

  Clarence Day

  Reality, Ethics, Morality

  CLARENCE DAY (1948). “THE BEST”

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• Conscience is a great moralist inside us with a stick in its hand. It is a whip of virtue which oppresses us unmercifully when we do wrong.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Hands, Sticks, Virtue

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• Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.

  John Carroll

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.31, Taylor & Francis

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• Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Fire, Inspire, Soul

  'La Nouvelle Hèloise' (1761, ed. M. Launay, 1967) pt. 2, letter 11

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• There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Passion, Ambition, Character

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• In spite of what moralists say, the, animals are scarcely less wicked or less unhappy than we are ourselves. The arrogance of the strong, the servility of the weak, low rapacity, ephemeral pleasure purchased by great effort, death preceded by long suffering, all belong to the animals as they do to men.

  Georges Cuvier

  Death, Strong, Science

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• Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

  Alain Badiou

  Plato, Philosophical, Order

  "Plato, Our Dear Plato!". Magazine littéraire, no. 447, November 2005.

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• It is one thing to decry the rat race...that is the good and honorable work of moralists. It is quite another thing to quit the rat race, to drop out, to refuse to run any further--that is the work of the individualist. It is offensive because it is impolite it makes the rebuke personal the individualist calls not his or her behavior into question, but mine.

  Paul Gruchow

  Running, Race, Rats

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• We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.

  Samuel Johnson

  Intellectual, Perception, Matter

  'The Lives of the English Poets' (1779-81) 'Milton'

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• any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

  Sue Grafton

  Artist, Two, Mystery

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• If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

  Timothy Leary

  Moving, Want, Hives

  Timothy Leary (2001). “Your Brain Is God”, p.34, Ronin Publishing

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• What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.

  Honore de Balzac

  People, Judging, Crime

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• There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.

  John Carroll

  Responsibility, Evil, Woe

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.64, Taylor & Francis

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• It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans.

  Max Frisch

  Men, Civilization, Giving

  Max Frisch (1994). “Homo Faber”, p.117, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it. With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.

  Julien Benda

  Leader, Honor, Crowds

  "Treason of the Intellectuals". Book by Julien Benda, pp. 110-111, 1927.

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• The modern moralists extol ... the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.

  Julien Benda

  Modern, Defiance, Cult

  Julien Benda (2011). “The Treason of the Intellectuals”, p.146, Transaction Publishers

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• I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Firsts, Appearance

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, p.166, Yale University Press

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• I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists" and politicians, plutocrats, bankers, arms dealers, and experts and technocrats were not solely defining the moral norms as well as the political lives of our societies. We do have some writers claiming to be public moralists, but, as I said, they have actually been more jingoistic than even the henchmen of Bush and Blair.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Political, Bankers, Experts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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