Best 1590 quotes in «morality quotes» category

What benefit have the Hindus derived from their contact with Christian nations? The idea generally prevalent in this country about the morality and truthfulness of the Hindus evidently has been very low. Such seeds of enmity and hatred have been sown by the missionaries that it would be an almost Herculean task to establish better relations between India and America... If we examine Greek, Chinese, Persian, or Arabian writings on the Hindus, before foreigners invaded India, we find an impartial description of their national character. Megasthenes, the famous Greek ambassador, praises them for their love of truth and justice, for the absence of slavery, and for the chastity of their women. Arrian, in the second century, Hiouen-thsang, the famous Buddhist pilgrim in the seventh century, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, have written in highest terms of praise of Hindu morality. The literature and philosophy of Ancient India have excited the admiration of all scholars, except Christian missionaries.

What decides whether a man will become immortal, is not his character but his vitality. Nothing save intensity confers immortality. A man manifests himself more vividly, in proportion as he is strong and unified, effective and unique. Immortality knows nothing of morality or immorality, of good or evil; it measures only work and strength; it demands from a man not purity but unity. Here, morality is nothing; intensity, all.

What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance--that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don't steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn't learned the costs of violence on their own.

- What do you expect? Think we were sent into the world to have a soft time and what is it? Float on flowery beds of ease? Think Man was just made to be happy? - Why not? Though I've never discovered anybody that knew what the deuce Man really was made for! - Well, we know not just in the Bible alone, but it stands to reason a man who doesn't buckle down and do his duty, even if it does bore him sometimes, is nothing but a... well, he's simply a weakling. Mollycoddle, in fact! And what do you advocate? Come down to cases! If a man is bored by his wife, do you seriously mean he has a right to chuck her and take a sneak, or even kill himself? - Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.

What else could I do? You couldn't just say no. I had to think about...my...position.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism", the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.

What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?

What happens when those of us living at the pace of fashion try to insert an awareness of these much larger cycles into our everyday activity? In other words, what's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year impact of tossing that plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. Unless we're living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It's a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled in to the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It's less of a Long Now than a Short Forever. This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We'll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It's the effort to make the "now" responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?

What is the moral reason to do anything? Is it my pleasure? Or is it simply some imprecise calculus of figuring out the greatest good for the greatest number? Or is there a hard and fast thing called the right thing?

What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole — rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of ‘moral’ argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications.

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.

What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?

What was it that Granny Weatherwax had said once? "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things". And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family.

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together

What we now call "morality" was evolved – as nearly all social and physical human attributes were – to aid us in survival and, ultimately, reproduction. This morality requires only that we be guided by our developed conscience (or "moral sense") – and not a God or gods.

What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery.

When a child reaches adolescence, there is very apt to be a conflict between parents and child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The opinions they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret.

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he exposed the world to a momentous discovery . For the first time in history, human beings were seen not as creatures of divine origin, but instead, as a product of nature, an animal like every other on the planet. Imagine yourself back in that amazing year. The day before Darwin’s book was published, you wake up thinking yourself the image of God; the next morning you realize you have the face of a monkey. Not everybody immediately embraced this rude demotion from god to goat.

When a moral man speaks, listen. But when immoral men speak, toss away their words like bad fruit. Truth will never shine from a heart filled with corruption and lies.

When an individual spreads rumors about others, it erroneously damage their reputation. Therefore, this individual would eventually face the consequences from the victim because this kind of behavior is considered as a civil offense which consist of slander statements.

When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunnaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak, so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind. ...When Marduk sent me to rule over men, to give the protection of right to the land, I did right and righteousness in . . . , and brought about the well-being of the oppressed. [The oldest known written code of laws from around 1772 BCE]

When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does?

When a political opponent resorts to the racist card, it's a sure sign of moral bankruptcy: there's no decent argument left in the armoury.

When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?

When greed transcends rationale, morality becomes irrelevant.

When he answered, he went all the way back to beginnings. He instructed me about the individual, about freedom and dignity, about the human being as subject and the fact that one may not turn him into an object. “Don’t you remember how furious you would get as a little boy when Mama knew better what was good for you? Even how far one can act like this with children is a real problem. It is a philosophical problem, but philosophy does not concern itself with children. It leaves them to pedagogy, where they’re not in very good hands. Philosophy has forgotten about children.” He smiled at me. “Forgotten them forever, not just sometimes, the way I forget about you.” “But . . .” “But with adults I see absolutely no justification for setting other people’s views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves.” “Not even if they themselves are happy about it later?” He shook his head. “We’re not talking about happiness, we’re talking about dignity and freedom. Even as a little boy, you knew the difference. It was no comfort to you that your mother was always right.

When it comes to morals & principles, a man in the 'real' world has two options; compromise or wait for sometime and then compromise.

When in doubt about whether an action is good or bad, I ask myself whether it will hurt another person. Regardless of whether we can pinpoint the ultimate meaning of existence, aren’t people important?

When life makes it impossible for a man to pursue his dreams, he will connive to pursue them anyway.

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

When the dust settles and we look back, will we be okay with what we see?" End Times Alaska by Craig Martelle

When the collective moral sense is relieved of the incubus of law, it may still be unjust in many instances, but its injustice will take a less permanent form and one more capable of rectification, whereas its sense of justice may be perpetually widened and increased by the growth of knowledge and human sympathy. Certainly, judging from its present influence, it will be strong enough to serve as a restraint upon those individuals who refuse to respect the rights of others. But when Society has ceased deliberately to condemn certain of its members to infamy and despair from their birth, there are both physical and moral grounds for the belief that the "criminal classes" will cease to exist. Crime will become sufficiently rare to give the mass of the population courage to face the fact that moral depravity, like madness, is a terrible affliction, a disease to be carefully treated and remedied, not punished and augmented by ill-treatment. We know this now, but we are too cowardly or too Pharisaical to admit it.

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

When we pay attention to this history,  a pattern emerges: first,  the Redeemers attacked voting rights. Then they attacked public education, labor, fair tax policies, and progressive leaders. Then they took over the state and federal courts, so they could be used to render rulings that would undermine the hope of a new America. This effort culminated in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring segregation of public facilities under the doctrine "separate but equal." And then they made sure that certain elements had guns so that they could return the South back to the status quo ante, according to their deconstructive immoral philosophy.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

When you assume the goodness in one group is an exception but believe the goodness in your group is the norm, you're probably being prejudiced.

When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame?

When you etch your moral code in stone, you have no room for editing. You leave open the possibility that, as our ethical views evolve, your code becomes less relevant. You could find yourself with four of ten divine moral laws describing how to treat God and zero that prohibit rape or slavery.

Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with the figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.

When you look down the length of your chain and see it is made mostly of weak links it is time to pull out the bolt cutters.

When you present something in writing to a vast group of audiences that has an obscured meaning to it, it means that you are trying to delude your readers from figuring out your actual idea. This kind of act can jeopardize other peoples' life and someone who has a distinguished intelligence can eventually intervene your actions and you could face civil or criminal allegations for fraud because this kind of behavior is considered as a serious offense.

When you repay evil with evil, you become evil.

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

​Who gets to Live? You or Your Rules?