Philosophy & Thought: Ethics & Morality Quotes

"Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder"

Octave Mirbeau, Writer

"So much the worse, it may be, for a particular meeting: but the meeting is the individual, which on evolution principles, must be sacrificed for the development of the race"

Arthur Cayley, Mathematician

"I was fascinated that everybody in the story thinks that they're in the right"

Andrew McCarthy, Actor

"We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition"

Alex Comfort, Author

"And what it depends on, of course, is whether the story itself is worth the ethical compromise it requires and whether the competition is onto the story"

Roger Mudd, Journalist

"For as one star another far exceeds, So souls in heaven are placed by their deeds"

Robert Greene, Playwright

"The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings"

Norman Lear, Producer

"The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics"

Corliss Lamont, Philosopher

"Is advertising moral? It is part and parcel of the American free enterprise system... I challenge anybody to show any economic system that has done as much for so many in so short a time"

Morris Hite, Businessman

"I am sadly afraid that I must have done some wicked thing"

Antisthenes, Philosopher

"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect"

Lionel Trilling, Critic

"Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days, it'd die of remorse on the third"

Malcolm Lowry, Poet

"Confucianism strongly condemned the use of drugs like opium"

Robert Trout, Journalist

"One reason that I embarked on a study of Nazi doctors was that in this personal journey, I had the feeling increasingly that I did want to do a Holocaust study and that increasingly I wanted it to be of perpetrators, which I thought was more needed"

Robert Jay Lifton, Psychologist

"I had given up magic because it had reached a state of perfection. I felt that I was able to transform men into animals. I did not make use of this capability because I believed I could not justify an intervention of this kind in the life of another person"

Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Author

"If we say that anyone who 'moralizes' must be perfect morally, then we are in effect saying no one can moralize"

Jonah Goldberg, Celebrity

"While some of them acknowledge the obligation of natural morality in their mode of conducting their cases, and preserve their individual character as gentlemen, there are others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland"

George Combe, Educator

"If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak"

Satish Kumar, Activist

"Try to find the path of least resistance and use it without harming others. Live with integrity and morality, not only with people but with all beings"

Steven Seagal, Actor

"People are first and foremost Republicans, first and foremost Anarchists, first and foremost a man or woman, and that is a mistake. It hurts the individual and it hurts the whole"

Peter Krause, Actor

"There is no happiness for people at the expense of other people"

Anwar Sadat, Statesman

"The trifle now inscribed with your name was occasioned by a particular fact; but to the disgrace of human nature, the subject is sufficiently general to interest every heart not totally impenetrable"

Thomas Day, Author

"I have never been to a brothel. I don't think I could go into one"

Stephen Rea, Actor

"I'm against abortion"

Charles Evers, Activist

"Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another"

Herbert Marcuse, Philosopher

"I believe that dogma is often evil"

Pat Buckley, Clergyman

"And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so"

A. B. Yehoshua, Novelist

"Violence is not funny"

William Friedkin, Director

"Cruel and cold is the judgment of man, Cruel as winter, and cold as the snow; But by-and-by will the deed and the plan Be judged by the motive that lieth below"

Lewis J. Bates

"Being part of the natural world reminds me that innocence isn't ever lost completely; we just need to maintain our goodness to regain it"

Jewel, Musician

"For decades, the journalistic norm had been that the private lives of public officials remained private unless that life impinged on public performance"

Roger Mudd, Journalist

"The very success of medicine in a material way may now threaten the soul of medicine"

Walter Martin, Clergyman

"I'm moved to think about the political state of our country right now. Most people who go out and vote have a very clear sense of what's right and wrong. And a lot of those people who don't aren't sure, so they don't go out and vote"

Peter Krause, Actor

"Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral"

Vernon A. Walters, Soldier

"It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it"

Lionel Trilling, Critic

"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination"

Thomas de Quincey, Author

"Here in Davos, it is generally assumed that there is now only one god - the market"

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Politician

"Why cannot we correct the baneful passions without weakening the good?"

Zebulon Pike, Soldier

"Our criteria for deciding what's good and what's bad is very fickle, especially in this country"

Roberta Flack, Musician

"I really didn't know there was two sides to the abortion issue"

Norma McCorvey, Celebrity

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