Moral Quotes

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have.

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

The Ten Commandments have never been replaced as the moral basis upon which society rests.

The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don't.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

Sometimes the dues we pay to maintain integrity are pretty high, but the ultimate cost of moral compromise is so much higher.

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.

Humans are, as Sartre put it, 'condemned to be free'. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.

Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.

The truth is, no matter how trying they become, babies two and under don't have the ability to make moral choices, so they can't be bad. That category only exists in the adult mind.

It is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man's degeneration, and it is dangerous to judge a man's physical and moral sanity by outside standards.

In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.

Fear is often disguised as moral outrage.

Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.

Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.

Pain and disease awaken us to convictions which are necessary to our moral condition.

He left the name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.

If the Court finds that there is not a state interest in discriminating and showing moral disapproval of homosexuality then we can't stop equal marriage rights.

Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan's endorsement - it might be useful but it doesn't necessarily speak well of you.

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.

Morals refine manners, as manners refine morals.

If you know something is morally reprehensible, then it is your moral obligation to stop it as soon as possible.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

One might have thought the world would stop ascribing moral equivalence between acts of terrorism and acts of punishing terrorism. It has not happened that way.

A rational process is a moral process.

Gambling undermines the moral fiber of society.

In reasoning upon moral subjects, we have great occasion for candor, in order to compare circumstances, and weigh arguments with impartiality.

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection, and the base of a moral existence.

What is guilt? It is moral self-reproach-I did wrong when it was possible to have done otherwise.

We may pretend we are basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

President Obama believes that we have a moral obligation to the next generation to leave our land, water, and wildlife better than we found it.

Never fly commercial. That's the moral of this story.

There can be no compromise on moral principles.

The majority of people who join law enforcement are doing it for good, moral reasons, but then there are the few who get through, where you go, 'Whoa, hold on a second. What's this guy doing here?'

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.

Golf is a game not just of manners but of morals.

The higher the moral tone, the more suspect the speaker.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

A moral, sensible, and well-bred manWill not affront me, and no other can.

In government-directed economies, the collective takes priority over the individual. The moral ideal is equal results. That approach could not be further removed from the real world.

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.