Philosophy & Thought: Ethics & Morality Quotes

"These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness"

Anthony de Mello, Writer

"But I felt that most of us in the world today gave priority to our personal interests"

Paul Hoffman, Celebrity

"I always say that bad women are fewer than men, but when you get one, they're fascinating because they're so rotten"

Ann Rule, Writer

"I looked at a fetal development chart at the Operation Rescue Office in Dallas. I had a lot of emotions stirring up inside of me. That's when I decided that it was wrong in any stage of pregnancy"

Norma McCorvey, Celebrity

"I don't think there is a good reason for an abortion, but Dr. Jasper made me really realize it was just a racket. He was just doing it for the money. He didn't care about the women"

Norma McCorvey, Celebrity

"Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator"

Wyndham Lewis, Author

"Most of the debate over the cultures of death and life is about process. The debate focuses on the technology available to determine how we prolong life and how and when we end it"

Suzanne Fields, Writer

"I've used drugs that I do consider to be dangerous, drugs that are potentially detrimental to kids and society at large"

Tim Robbins, Actor

"Nothing is proved, all is permitted"

Theodore Dreiser, Novelist

"You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness"

Tracy Kidder, Author

"Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?"

Sarah Vowell, Author

"I never had any hang-ups about sex. As for being sexually repressed, nothing could be further from the truth. There are more hang-ups now than ever there were when I was growing up"

Mary Whitehouse, Activist

"I suppose I'm intrigued with the bad traits of society, because I'm a part of society, and the bad traits pose the dangerous questions for our future"

Jude Law, Actor

"The ideals of the party were close to me, and I have tried to adhere to those principles all my life. In essence, they are the same as in the Ten Commandments in the Bible. I will never change my convictions"

Valentina Tereshkova, Astronaut

"In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage"

Thomas de Quincey, Author

"I'm a true believer in karma. You get what you give, whether it's bad or good"

Sandra Bullock, Actress

"AIDS is a judgment we have brought upon ourselves"

Mary Whitehouse, Activist

"When I was in my 20s, it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody"

John McGahern, Writer

"We not only have a legal obligation to honor our commitments, we have a moral obligation to provide the coverage we promised to provide to these people"

Bob Ney, Politician

"Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos"

William Irwin Thompson, Philosopher

"The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs"

John Dos Passos, Novelist

"I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're in pain and it hurts, and you're desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it's so seductive and you just do... and all that"

Patrick Marber, Writer

"The thing is, I don't believe in most of what's done. The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing, which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being"

William Hurt, Actor

"Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken"

Lemuel K. Washburn, Writer

"The British system denied any role for human creativity, and instead argued, that if man merely followed his hedonistic desires, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, objective laws would naturally guide society to achieve the best allocation of wealth"

Robert Trout, Journalist

"We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning"

George Steiner, Critic

"The older I get, the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad"

Ted Demme, Director

"I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that!"

David Hasselhoff, Actor

"If a man wishes to truly not be written about, he would do well not to write letters to 18-year-old girls, inviting them into his life"

Joyce Maynard, Writer

"I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited"

Patrick Stewart, Actor

"The whole drive of Western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch"

Henry Flynt, Artist

"I have certain moral parameters that I do not cross in writing; I don't write about adultery or kids having premarital sex"

Nicholas Sparks, Author

"Religion is a strange, wonderful thing. More crimes have been committed in the name of righteousness than any other notion"

Tom T. Hall, Musician

"We think we have a responsibility. And I think it's important for all of us in the Western world to realize that we've all been blessed a lot, and if you go to these parts, they don't have a lot, even before the tsunami"

Kevin Rollins, Businessman

"Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel"

Jane Porter, Novelist

"I do not think that there is a reputable scientist on this planet who would advocate using this technology to generate a human child, as was just announced"

Robert Lanza, Scientist

"Irony, I feel, is a very high form of morality"

Jean Stafford, Writer

"People are just fascinated by assassinations"

Louis Stokes, Politician

"As President, I will end once and for all the use of taxpayer funds to promote the National Endowment for the Arts and other programs that subsidize amoral and degrading activities"

Gary Bauer, Public Servant

"I think there's a bit of the devil in everybody. There's a bit of a priest in everybody, too, but I enjoyed playing the devil more. He was more fun"

Gabriel Byrne, Actor

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