A Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.
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To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.
It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral.
Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
It is a moral issue how we are going to treat workers. On these issues, these are moral issues, principled issues, where there aren't compromises.
Medical ethics is a fascinating discipline, as it deals with issues replete with complex philosophical, moral, and ethical considerations that are rarely black or white.
I feel it’s important to talk about the complex issues affecting us. And these are complex issues. I think it’s insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.
I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.
If by sticking to the moral principles you have followed all your life, you jeopardize your happiness and that of others, throw over your principles. Principles for principles' sake -that is not wisdom; that is obstinacy. Principles should be fluid because life is fluid.
I should be able to express moral views on social issues without being slandered, accused of hate speech, and told from those who preach ‘tolerance’ that I need to either bend my beliefs to their moral standards or be silent when I’m in the public square.
We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.
And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.
The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.
Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.
There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.
Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
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