Selected morality quotes

1. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

2. All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness ... the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

3. I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. The whole world would rejoice to see the Hitler of peace and tolerance, and nothing would adorn his name in world history so much as acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor. ... Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.

4. A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

5. Conscience is a man's compass.

6. For I must write to The Times tonight, and save the world from sin.

7. God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.

8. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.

9. As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated.

10. The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not doing. We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.

11. The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.

12. I believe in Providence and I believe Providence to be just. Therefore I believe that Providence always rewards the strong, the industrious, and the upright.

13. If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us. In the long run He never leaves decent folk in the lurch. Often He may test them, He may send trials upon them, but in the long run He always lets His sun shine upon them once more and at the end He gives them His blessing.

14. If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work.

15. I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

16. Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

17. The fundamental premise of liberalism is the moral incapacity of the American people.

18. There can be no self-government without self-discipline. There can be no self-government without self-control. There can be no liberty unless it is grounded in moral discipline and the ability to do what is right.

19. Harden our hearts to the innocents in the womb, and we have hardened our hearts to the need for compassion, and mercy, and fellow-feeling, and charity, and decency in this world.

20. A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

21. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

22. The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

23. Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.

24. The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil.

25. To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.

26. Day by day we should weigh what we have granted to the spirit of the world against what we have denied to the spirit of Jesus, in thought and especially in deed.

27. Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

28. I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

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

30. Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.

31. Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.

32. A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.

33. Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just, but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.

34. Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land And how a child to the virgin came? Will you tell them that the reason why we murdered Everything upon the surface of the world Is so we can stand right up and say we did it in his name?

35. So for those of you who haven't read any of my five best-selling books: Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly.

36. People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

37. We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.

38. The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.

39. There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

40. I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.

41. We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness-the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

42. Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace - made me expect the worst.

43. Man has no right to kill his brother, it is no excuse that he does so in uniform. He only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

44. It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

45. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

46. The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

47. To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

48. Will Honeycomb calls these over-offended ladies the outrageously virtuous.

49. To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

50. From his brimstone bed, at break of day, A-walking the Devil is gone, To look at his little, snug farm of the World, And see how his stock went on.

51. My only objection to the arrangements there is the two-in-a-bed system. It is bad.... But let your words and conduct be perfectly pure - such as your mother might know without bringing a blush to your cheek.... If not already mentioned, do not tell your mother of the doubling in bed.

52. Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.' Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.

53. He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

54. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

55. And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility.

56. He saw a lawyer killing a viper On a dunghill hard, by his own stable And the devil smiled, for it put him in mind Of Cain and his brother, Abel.

57. Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, - as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.

58. If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.

59. I do deeply deplore, of the sake of the cause, the prevalent notion, that the clergy must be had, either by persuasion or by bribery. They will not need persuasion or bribery, if their hearts are with us; if they are not, we are better without them. It is idle to suppose that the kingdom of heaven cannot come on earth, without their cooperation.

60. The world isn't fair, but as long as it's tilting in my direction I find that there's a natural cap to my righteous indignation.

61. Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good.

62. They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.

63. I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.

64. The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rests on that universal order...

65. Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?

66. If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is- holy war.

67. The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion.

68. Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

69. 'If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.'

70. 'In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.'

71. 'Intelligence is a moral category.'

72. 'The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.'

73. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.

74. Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

75. If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

76. Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!

77. Social progress means a checking of the cosmic, process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

78. :in the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.

79. Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgement are the same thing, and as the judgement, so also the conscience may be erroneous.

80. Through life let your principal object be the discharge of duty.

81. Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

82. [M]y religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ[.]

83. I believe... that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

84. Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

85. 'The Devil doesn't make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn't make us mean. Rather, when we're mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world.'

86. There may be a time in life when one is tired of everything and feels as if all one does is wrong, and there maybe some truth in it - do you think this is a feeling one must try to forget and to banish, or is it 'the longing for God,' which one must not fear, but cherish to see if it may bring us some good? Is it 'the longing for God' which leads us to make a choice which we never regret? Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil.

87. My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

88. The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

89. A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature - a good bit, of course, but a bit only - in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence.

90. The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality - both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.

91. Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.

92. Children of the future Age Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.

93. He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer: For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

94. O what fine thought we had because we thought That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

95. Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase Are fruits of innocence and blessedness.

96. Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.

97. If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green.... If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.

98. What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, - nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

99. The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.

100. The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?