Top 1200 Moral Decay Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Without God and religion you don't have moral truth, you have moral opinion

On devient moral de' s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.

The more moral you pretend to be, the less moral you are; the less moral you try to be, the more moral you are.

For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.

Being a moral realist I see normative ethics as a search of the truth about our obligations and a search of explanation; the idea is that moral principles can help us to a moral explanation of our particular obligations.

Moral decay first hampers and then strangles honest government, regular commerce, and even the ability to take genuine pleasure in the goods of this world. Compulsion is applied from above as self-discipline relaxes below, and the last liberties expire under the weight of a unitary state.... Since religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary that divided good from evil is overthrown; kings and nations are guided by chance and none can say where are the natural limits of despotism and the bound of license.

Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?

I think we are trying to run the space age with horse and buggy moral and spiritual equipment. Technology you see has no morals; and with no moral restraints man will destroy himself ecologically, militarily, or in some other way. Only God can give a person moral restraints and spiritual strength.

The objections to religion are of two sorts - intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.

By "moral discipline," I mean self-discipline based on moral standards. Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is right, even when it is hard. It rejects the self-absorbed life in favor of developing character worthy of respect and true greatness through Christlike service.

The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.

Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.

You know what I think about violence. For me it is profoundly moral -more moral than compromises and transactions.

The moral duty of man consists of imitatingthe moral goodness and beneficence of God,manifested in the creation, toward all His creatures.

I look at the most promising putative moral theories. I construct crucial thought experiments in areas where they give conflicting advice. I confront their conflicting advice with my own moral sensitivity, my moral intuition. I take the theory that can best explain the content of my intuitions as gaining inductive support through an inference to the best explanation.

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.

Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative.

Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.

I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle.

The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God, manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty

In the West, they have morality. We pretend to be moral people but we are not. We do not have a moral code.

I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.

Any church which forsakes the regular and uniform for the periodical and spasmodic service of God, is doomed to decay; any church which relies for its spiritual strength and growth entirely upon seasons of "revival," will very soon have no genuine revivals to rely on. Our holy God will not conform His blessings to man's moods and moral caprice. If a church is declining, it may require a "revival" to restore it; but what need was there of its declining?

Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men havethe same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.

The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.

Moral virtues and intellectual virtues are very different from each other, and moral virtue has to do with motivation, not cognition. Moral virtue requires a human level of intelligence, but it doesn't require that one be an intelligent human.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.

Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.

The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.

It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.

Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority - not the capture of moral high ground.

[nonviolence] seeks to secure moral ends through moral means.

I'm a former CIA officer and Pentagon official. I'm a deep believer in border security, but we have to be a nation of moral - of morals and, like, a moral core.

True knowledge gives a moral standing and moral strength.

A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

I think it's a really admirable thing to be very sure of your own moral code and not waver from that. If you're sure of your moral code, your moral code is personal. Something that I admire about my TV character is being unapologetic and knowing who she is. That was empowering to play.

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.

I think it is very important to build the moral fibre of the youth. Moral education should be part of the curriculum, and I will work towards introducing that.

Moral stimulation is good but moral complacency is the most dangerous habit of mind we can develop, and that danger is serious and ever-present.

'Moral police' is my new word. I am very against the media doing moral policing, giving opinions on actor's lives. Media should not become moral police; they should just report.

If you have a moral law then you must have a moral law giver. You don’t get a moral law unless there’s a moral law giver.

Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

Force cannot transmit a moral principle: moral ideas can be received only through the reason of the heart.

There's no moral issue for me. I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn't have the luxury of being a moral creature.

The foundation of leadership is your own moral compass. I think the best quality leaders really know where their moral compass is. They get it out when they are making decisions. It's their guide. But not only do you have to have a moral compass and take it out of your pocket, it has to have a true north.

If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding.

Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.

Leaders can be moral-and they should be moral-without imposing their morality on others.

There is no such thing as a moral dress. It's people who are moral or immoral.

God doesn't help. I think that's a knockdown argument. I think that it really shows that whatever moral knowledge we have and whatever moral progress we make in our knowledge or whatever progress we make in our moral knowledge is not coming really from religion. It's coming from the very hard work really of moral philosophy, of trying to ground our moral reasonings.

Nearly all our ills are the result of neglect in some way or other. And this truth may be said to apply to the ills of nations as well. Negligence is at the bottom of all decay. And decay always starts by showing little signs-or warnings. Then is the time to show interest and to be alert. There is nothing quite so easy as to neglect, and nothing quite so difficult as to repair that negligence. Negligence always carries a high price. It costs nothing to avoid it!

Moral result can only be produced by moral restraints.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

My father really set the tone for us to be a more moral nation, to take a moral high ground in everything that we do.