Philosophy & Thought: Ethics & Morality Quotes

"He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil"

William Godwin, Writer

"The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past"

Isaiah Berlin, Philosopher

"There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave"

Louis Kronenberger, Critic

"I never found, even in my juvenile hours, that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing"

Horace Walpole, Author

"I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew"

Martin Scorsese, Director

"So, use your own property as not to injure that of another"

Edward Coke, Businessman

"How long before we have, not just homosexual marriage, but homosexual unions between adult men and small boys?"

Randall Terry, Celebrity

"Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good"

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Novelist

"As individuals, we will be judged in our lives by the totality of our actions. Not one thing will stand out. And I think that's how we get judged by our colleagues and that's how we get judged by the Good Lord"

Rahm Emanuel, Politician

"Once you depart from the Ten Commandments as being the foundation of right and wrong, you are in a free fall"

Randall Terry, Celebrity

"In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli"

Howard Zinn, Historian

"To endeavor to domineer over conscience is to invade the citadel of heaven"

Charles V, Royalty

"The problem is we need much more moral content"

Cornel West, Educator

"As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy, from the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up"

Barbara Kruger, Artist

"Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right"

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Novelist

"If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide"

Meg Greenfield, Editor

"Most of the Ten Commandments are negative. The purpose of law is not to mandate good behavior. That concept comes from the French Revolution"

Randall Terry, Celebrity

"Man is most happy when his own actions are arguments and examples of his virtue"

John Webster, Playwright

"Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction"

Natalie Clifford Barney, Author

"We are not at the same place we were in 1973. This country today is drifting, moving steadily towards the pro-life position because the data is with us"

Randall Terry, Celebrity

"If you commit a big crime, then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime, the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault"

Peggy Noonan, Writer

"Abortion is either OK or it's not"

Peggy Noonan, Writer

"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men"

Norman Mailer, Novelist

"Discretion is nothing other than the sense of justice with respect to the sphere of the intimate contents of life"

Georg Simmel, Sociologist

"Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue"

Hosea Ballou, Clergyman

"Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness"

Hosea Ballou, Clergyman

"Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered"

Georg Simmel, Sociologist

"The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions"

William O. Douglas, Judge

"Wickedness is its own punishment"

Francis Quarles, Poet

"It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard"

Hermann Hesse, Novelist

"Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart, and a sting in her tail"

Francis Quarles, Poet

"Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists"

Cornel West, Educator

"I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me"

Barbara Kruger, Artist

"By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth"

Barry Commoner, Scientist

"Morality will perform all this; and Morality is the fruit of Illumination"

Adam Weishaupt, Clergyman

"In all unmerciful actions, the worst of men pay this compliment at least to humanity, as to endeavour to wear as much of the appearance of it, as the case will well let them"

Laurence Sterne, Novelist

"As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing!"

Albert Ellis, Psychologist

"One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct"

Laurence Sterne, Novelist

"But I think the bomb, instead, constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature, too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into old concepts"

Henry L. Stimson, Statesman

"The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow"

William Cowper, Poet

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