Top 1200 Moral Ethics Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

I care not for the theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic of your moral code, I care not for the hoary respectability and traditional mysticisms of your theological institutions, I care not for the beauty and solemnity of your rituals and religious ceremonies, I care not even for the reasonableness and unimpeachable fairness of your social ethics,--if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer, men and women,--if it does not add to the world's stock of valuable souls,--if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men--I will have none of it.

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.

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.

The test of moral ideas is moral results.

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.

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

I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.

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.

There is a claim coming from the West that says that all art must be outside any moral consideration. I can understand this as a provocation, but I also believe that we can still have very profound creativity with a moral sense.

Marriage and parenting are the two strongest vows anyone will ever make. When you see these commitments being carelessly discarded, you can be certain that the ethics of that generation have been abandoned. ... What our society needs is a good dose of biblical ethic from God's people - the kind of ethic that requires us to keep our word no matter what the costs. Situational ethics have so shaped our society that even God's people have lost the concept of absolutes when it comes to keeping our word.

There is nothing - not any religious or secular body of work - that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.

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

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

God has so framed us as to make freedom of choice and action the very basis of all moral improvement, and all our faculties, mental and moral, resent and revolt against the idea of coercion.

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.

Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do alongside the eternal laws of God, and seeing how it stands by those laws of God.

Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.

The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.

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

Much of the world's moral compass is broken. The moral north reads south and the moral south reads north.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

My view of ethics and of its priority is connected to my view that we are fundamentally relational beings - both the product of human interactions, as well as committed as part of the expression of our own humanity to various social involvements. I see ethics as having two places in the maintenance of these relational activities - first as providing the basic coinage of our interactions qua humans and second as mediating the various roles we assume as humans.

Robert Torricelli, a powerful fund-raiser who helped raise more than $100 million for the Democratic party, took inappropriate gifts from a businessman, including an $8,000 gold Rolex watch, for which he was severely admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee in July. To recap: raising $100 million in contributions from gigantic corporations - ethical; taking a watch - unethical. That's the Senate Ethics Committee, an oxymoron since 1974.

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

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

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.

In the final forms of moral disengagement, wrongdoers treat adversaries as subhuman animalistic, demonic beings. Expunging any sense of shared humanity eliminates moral restraints.

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.

What good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world - temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics.

"Teachers"... treat students neither coercively nor instrumentally but as joint seekers of truth and of mutual actualization. They help students define moral values not by imposing their own moralities on them but by positing situations that pose hard moral choices and then encouraging conflict and debate. They seek to help students rise to higher stages of moral reasoning and hence to higher levels of principled judgment.

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.

Few things are more damaging to our democracy than a military officer who doesn't have the moral courage to stand up for what's right or the moral fiber to step aside when circumstances dictate.

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

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

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

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.

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.

One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.

History has taught us that freedom cannot long survive unless it is based on moral foundations. You can get the economics right, but in addition liberty must be cultivated as a moral quality.

Moral result can only be produced by moral restraints.

I believe in both a creative and personal God, a divinely ordered universe, that man has an innate moral sense, and that Jesus was a great moral teacher, perhaps the greatest the world has witnessed.

Let's just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.

We get our ethics from our history and judge our history by our ethics.

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.

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

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

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.

Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him.

Ethics and power are separate. Ethics and morality. I think life would be miserable if there weren't some kind of code that people operated by, but history is full of many, many people who have gotten power by very unethical means, and people who were very ethical, who get no power, people who have the most brilliant, lovely, wonderful, nice intentions and bring about horrible things in the world because they don't know how to play the power game.

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.