quotations about morality
Custom alone regulates morals.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Revolt of the Angels
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
GEORGES BATAILLE
attributed, "The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille", On Bataille
What counts as morality is visible; it is seen by others, and it is they who judge whether or not one's act is moral. In this visible and public world, being is equated with acting ... and it is this surface world of appearances that counts in the world of sociality. Being godly, conversely, is equated with feeling. To be godly is to have one's heart full of God, a notion reminiscent of the Orthodox concept of theosis, at which point the world of appearances, the world of acts, is no longer central. Godly morality, then, cannot be judged by others because it is not visible; it does not depend upon the public. Only God, and perhaps the one who is godly, can know what is in the heart.
JARRETT ZIGON
"Aleksandra Vladimirovna: Moral Narratives of a Russian Orthodox Woman", Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Across the Plains
Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.
ROBERT BOLT
A Man For All Seasons
I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
IAIN M. BANKS
Excession
In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull House
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
GRAHAM GREENE
A Sort of Life
Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
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
This is the very heart of true morality--not to struggle, not to fight with any weapons, for one's self alone--but to struggle and to fight for the common interest, to wield the power of brain and good right arm if need be for one's family, for the ordered community of life, for the state, for moral principles, humanity, and the common good.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Nation and the Ethics of War and Preparedness: An Address
Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H. G. WELLS
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
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
The Importance of Character Morality is not a political matter of negotiating and engineering compromises to suit various pressure groups. It is matter of genuinely discerning what is in the interests of people.
ROGER TRIGG
Morality Matters
There is in every moral being a faculty or sense by which he is enabled to distinguish right from wrong.
GEORGE SHARSWOOD
Commentaries on the Laws of England
A choice is the root of all morality. Without choice, one can have no moral code. In a vacuum bereft of alternatives, there can be no values. And without values, there can be no reason for a code of ethics. What gives our lives meaning is which alternatives we choose. If we have no options, if we can take but one path, we are by definition slaves.
DAVE GALANTER
Troublesome Minds
Until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
MACAULAY
On Moore's Life of Lord Byron
Moral virtues are so many sweet flowers strewed over a dead corpse, which hide the loathsomeness of it, but inspire not life into it.
JOHN FLAVEL
The Whole Works of the Reverend Mr. John Flavel