quotations about morality
I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true.... If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.
LISA RANDALL
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Discover Magazine, July 2006
We should never doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step toward totalitarianism.
KENNETH MINOGUE
The Servile Mind, How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
Morality is necessary for our flourishing as humans, not because it is a disguised form of egoism, but because to flourish as humans is to live well together in communities.
DAVID FISHER
Morality and War: Can War Be Just in the Twenty-first Century?
The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?
C. G. JUNG
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Neither the home, nor the churches, nor the communities have stopped teaching morality for a moment. What has happened during the last half century or so is that some of this teaching has become confused, contradictory, uncertain. Also, its contents have become very different from what an unexamined popular voice still calls the moral virtues. One result is that children nowadays are exposed to a teaching of widely divergent values, compared to a still recent era when those taught by home, church, community, and school were one and the same.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Moral Education: Five Lectures
Morality hides and covers, but never mortifies, nor cures the Corruptions of Nature; and mortified they must be, or you cannot be saved.
JOHN FLAVEL
The Whole Works of the Reverend Mr. John Flavel
Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.
ROBERT BOLT
A Man For All Seasons
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
AYN RAND
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Almost every Englishman imagines he is moral because he objects to immorality--in others.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
It is the dutiful disposition of each person to spread morality outside of himself to the best of his ability and knowledge, i.e., to see to it that everyone has the same disposition he has ... It follows from this that the overall end of the moral community as a whole is to produce unanimity concerning matters of morality.
JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE
The System of Ethics: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre
We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.
VOLTAIRE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Morality does not derive its nature from books, but from the fitness of things.
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
There is nothing ... quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It's easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality -- to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting -- but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued -- if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing -- are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.
ADAM PHILLIPS
Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Victims of Morality", Mother Earth, March 1913