Morality Quotes - Page 33

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

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Pain, Ethics, Compulsion

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.62, Courier Corporation

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• Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

  Max Lerner

  Humanity, Enemy, Privilege

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• The cause of all human evils is the not being able to apply general principles to special cases.

  Epictetus

  Evil, Special, Principles

  Epictetus (1866). “The Works of Epictetus: Consisting of His Discourses, in Four Books, the Enchiridion, and Fragments”, p.295

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• Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

  Oscar Wilde

  Mean, Interesting, Intellectual

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.190, Courier Corporation

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• Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.

  Clarence Day

  Reality, Ethics, Dislike

  CLARENCE DAY (1948). “THE BEST”

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• He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Mind, Weakness, Ethics

  "Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrat" by Baruch Spinoza, part III: "On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions", 1677.

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• Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love Life, Giving, Lovely

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• In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

  Henry Adams

  Men, Practice, Principles

  Henry Adams (2015). “The Education of Henry Adams”, p.50, Booklassic

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• Riches may enable us to confer favors, but to confer them with propriety and grace requires a something that riches cannot give.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Money, Giving, Grace

  Charles Caleb COLTON (1849). “L.P.”, p.214

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• In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

  Mark Twain

  Mind, Ethics And Morals, Formality

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.456, Courier Corporation

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• Shortly after the birth control pill was approved for public distribution, one woman wrote to John Rock, its inventor, "You should be afraid to meet your maker." Rock, despite being Catholic replied, "My dear Madam, in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions."

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Rocks, Catholic, Taught

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• To know the good is to react against the bad. Indifference is the mark of deprivation.

  Marya Mannes

  Ethics, Indifference, Deprivation

  Marya Mannes (1958). “More in Anger”

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• The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Hurt, Integrity, Evil

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960). “The Journals”

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• In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Use, Want, Ethics

  W. Somerset Maugham (2010). “The Summing Up”, p.49, Random House

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• A just cause should need no interpretation yet flounders when confronted by self- interest and corruption.

  Peter Dunne

  Self, Needs, Causes

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• Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.

  Thomas Paine

  People, Ethics, Shocked

  Thomas Paine (2016). “COMMON SENSE (Political Classics Series): Advocating Independence to People in the Thirteen Colonies - Addressed to the Inhabitants of America”, p.541, e-artnow

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• If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Sick, Age, Ethics

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• Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mistake, Lying, Animal

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.42, Courier Corporation

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• Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.

  William Shakespeare

  Loyalty, Kings, Enemy

  'Henry VIII' (1613) act 3, sc. 2, l. 456

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• Veracity is the heart of morality.

  Thomas Huxley

  Truth, Honesty, Heart

  Leonard Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.123, Cambridge University Press

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• I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

  Albert Einstein

  God, Religious, Atheist

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.11, Broadway Books

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• Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Jesus, Ignorance

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• Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Men, Hypocrisy

  Thomas Jefferson (2011). “Jefferson on Freedom: Wisdom, Advice, and Hints on Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way”, p.34, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous falacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty...

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Men, Suffering

  Thomas Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, founders.archives.gov. June 18, 1779.

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• The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting Usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity.

  James Madison

  Christian, Religious, Heart

  James Madison (1965). “The forging of American federalism: selected writings of James Madison”

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