Morality Quotes - Page 2

• Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Real, Evil, Encounters

  Oliver Goldsmith (1842). “The Select Works of Oliver Goldsmith: In One Volume. With the Portrait of the Author..”, p.273

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• Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Liberty, And Love, Individual Morality

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• For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Love, Perfection, Being Thankful

  Thomas Carlyle, G. B. Tennyson (1984). “Carlyle Reader”, p.50, CUP Archive

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• Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

  Susan Sontag

  Beauty, Art, Intellectual

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• As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Science, Self, Ethics

  Arthur C. Clarke (2011). “Voices from the Sky”, p.87, Hachette UK

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• Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.

  George Washington

  Religious, Truth, Freedom

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• Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Integrity, Years, Over You

  Marcus Aurelius (2012). “Meditations”, p.22, Courier Corporation

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• It is long accepted by the missionaries that morality is inversely proportional to the amount of clothing people wore

  Alex Carey

  Long, People, Accepted

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• When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

  Shirley Chisholm

  Integrity, Patriotic, Power

  Shirley Chisholm (2010). “Unbought and Unbossed: Expanded 40th Anniversary Edition”, p.124, Take Root Media

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• If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  People, Giving, Vices

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2015). “Across The Plains”, p.139, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• What can laws do without morals?

  Benjamin Franklin

  Law, Moral

  Benjamin Franklin, William Temple Franklin (1818). “Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin ...”, p.317, Printed for H. Colborn

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• Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Running, Distance, Sea

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.729, Library of America

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• What is moral is what you feel good after.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Feel Good, Afternoon, Ethics And Morals

  Death in the Afternoon ch. 1 (1932)

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• We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people... it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

  John Quincy Adams

  Religious, Business, 4th Of July

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• Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Truth, Motherhood, Substance

  Mahatma Gandhi (1994). “The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook of His Life and Writings”, p.17, Grove Press

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• Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Motherhood, Principles, Fundamentals

  Albert Schweitzer, Charles Rhind Joy (1947). “Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology”, Boston : Beacon Press

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• The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

  Karl Kraus

  Women, Triumph, Men

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

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• A system of morality that is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception that has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

  Socrates

  Emotional, Sound, Ethics

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• Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

  George Washington

  Religious, Godly, Indulge In

  George Washington, United States. President (1789-1797 : Washington) (1847). “Washington's Farewell Address to the People of the United States of America: Published in September, 1796”, p.9

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• Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Crazy, Silly

  A Book of Burlesques ch. 11 (1920)

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

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Tyrants, Noses, Ethics

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Writing, Reading Literature

  The Picture of Dorian Gray preface (1891)

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• A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Integrity, Responsibility, Hypocrisy

  Thomas Jefferson (2004). “Light and Liberty: Reflections on the Pursuit of Happiness”, p.66, Modern Library

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• Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

  Karl Kraus

  Boredom, Literature, Disease

  "Karl Kraus". Book by Harry Zohn, p. 47, 1971.

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• We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Ridiculous, Fit, British

  "On Moore's Life of Lord Byron" by Thomas B. Macaulay, 1830.

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