A Quote by Mary Douglas

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.

Mary Douglas

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Destructive Moral Moral Superiority Superiority

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Mary Douglas
British - Scientist
March 25, 1921 - May 16, 2007

We are wrong to fear superiority of mind and soul; this superiority is very moral, for understanding everything makes a person tolerant and the capacity to feel deeply inspires great goodness.

Bill Vaughan

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

Jonathan Haidt

For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.

John W. Gardner

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return. With contempt you don't need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And the best of all, contempt is made to share. Stories about the moral failings of others are among the most common kinds of gossip, they are a stable of talk radio, and they offer a ready way for people to show that they share a common moral orientation.

Jonathan Haidt

Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.

Albert Bandura

The greatest threat to compassion is the temptation to succumb to fantasies of moral superiority.

Stephen Batchelor

But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Censoriously asserting one's moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

Bret Stephens

If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.

Betty Friedan

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

Barbara Kingsolver

Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness.

John Adams

When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth - that men are only equal - can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth.

Marilyn French

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.

Ayn Rand

Continued dependence on relief inducers a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party.

Dennis Lehane

A Quote by Mary Douglas

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