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Morality

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When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are "good" (or right) and those that are "bad" (or wrong).

Wisdom is purified by morality, and morality is purified by wisdom: where one is, the other is, the moral man has wisdom and the wise man has morality, and the combination of morality of wisdom is called the highest thing in the world. ~ Gautama Buddha

Quotes

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  • Moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.
    It is sayd there be a raunge of mountaynes in the Easte, on one syde of the which certayn conducts are immorall, yet on the other syde they are holden in good esteeme; wherebye the mountayneer is much conveenyenced, for it is given to him to goe downe eyther way and act as it shall suite his moode, withouten offence. —Gooke's Meditations
  • Immoral, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man's notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from, and nowise dependent on, their consequences—then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.
    • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
  • Wisdom is purified by morality, and morality is purified by wisdom: where one is, the other is, the moral man has wisdom and the wise man has morality, and the combination of morality of wisdom is called the highest thing in the world.
    • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, verse 22, as translated by M. Walshe, Thus Have I Heard: The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Boston, MA, 1987), p. 131
  • There are two principles of established acceptance in morals; first, that self-interest is the mainspring of all of our actions, and secondly, that utility is the test of their value.
  • To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
  • We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic — a moral code independent of religion — strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities?
  • Cowardice, caressed by Christianity, creates morality.
    • Bruno Filippi, The Rebel’s Dark Laughter: The Writings of Bruno Filippi (1918) [1]
  • 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", in Mother Earth, vol. 8, no. 1 (March 1913) [2]
  • Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
  • So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
  • Plausble moral theory must have at its center a concern for the lives and well-being of persons...It is presumtively wrong to do violence to innocent persons.
  • There is a principle, supposed to prevail among many, which is utterly incompatible with all virtue or moral sentiment; and as it can proceed from nothing but the most depraved disposition, so in its turn it tends still further to encourage that depravity. This principle is, that all benevolence is mere hypocrisy, friendship a cheat, public spirit a farce, fidelity a snare to procure trust and confidence; and that while all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises, in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations.
    • David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), appendix 2
  • The main objection to absolute morality is that even if there were absolute moral standards we should have no way of knowing whether we had found them.
  • When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom.
  • Though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it.
  • Dionysus used to laugh at professors who did research into the bad qualities of Ulysses yet knew nothing of their own; at musicians whose flutes were harmonious but not their morals; at orators whose studies led to talking about justice, not to being just.
    • Montaigne, Essays, bk. 1, ch. 25, as translated by M. Screech (Penguin Classics, 1991), p. 156
  • All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour.
  • I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
  • Morality has always had a difficult time of it; utility and legality even begrudge the fact of its existence.
    • Friedrich Schlegel, as translated by P. Firchow, Philosophical Fragments (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), "Athenaeum Fragments", § 373
  • People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality.
  • We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You've got to learn to behave like a duchess.
  • If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.
  • 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.
  • I always thought dancing improper; but it can't be since I myself am dancing.
  • Es stände besser um die Welt, wenn die Mühe, die man sich gibt, die subtilsten Moralgesetze auszuklügeln, zur Ausübung der einfachsten angewendet würde.
    • The world would be in better shape if people would take the same pains in the practice of the simplest moral laws as they exert in intellectualizing over the most subtle moral questions.
    • Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorismen (Berlin, 1880; 4th ed. 1895), as translated by D. Scrase and W. Mieder, Aphorisms (Riverside, CA, 1994), p. 30
  • Germs have no morals whatsoever in their instinctual drive to defeat other germs.

Bible

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The Bible on Wikisource
  • Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
  • You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts; for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.
  • He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. ?.

  • Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.
    • Arthur J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief.
  • No mere man since the Fall, is able in this life perfectly to keep the Commandments.
    • Book of Common Prayer, Shorter Catechism.
  • Rough Johnson, the great moralist.
  • The Bearings of this observation lays in the application on it.
    • Dickens, Dombey and Son, Chapter XXIII.
  • The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line.
    • Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects. Calvinism.
  • Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
    • Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects. Divus Cæsar.
  • Dr. Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.
  • Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.
  • 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 (1830)
  • I find the doctors and the sages
    Have differ'd in all climes and ages,
    And two in fifty scarce agree
    On what is pure morality.
    • Moore, Morality

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

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James H. Billington; Library of Congress (2010). Platt, Suzy. ed. Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. Dover Publications. ISBN 9780486472881. 
  • For what end shall we be connected with men, of whom this is the character and conduct?… Is it, that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured; speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, and the lothing of God and man?
    • Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis (1798), p. 20–21. Dwight, president of Yale, preached this sermon on July 4, 1798, at New Haven, Connecticut. In 1798, much of the anti-French feeling was directed at the Jeffersonians, who were the champions in America of the French Revolution. In the congressional elections that year, the Jeffersonians lost heavily as the Federalists won control of both the House and the Senate. In this sermon, Dwight warned that a victory for the Jeffersonians meant lustful moral depravity. Saul K. Padover, Jefferson (1942), p. 251–52
  • Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
    • John F. Kennedy, remarks in Bonn, West Germany, at the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps, June 24, 1963. The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 503. This remark may have been inspired by the passage from Dante Alighieri's La Comedia Divina, trans. Geoffrey L. Bickersteth, "Inferno", canto 3, lines 35–42 (1972):

      by those disbodied wretches who were loth
      when living, to be either blamed or praised.
      … … … … … …
      Fear to lose beauty caused the heavens to expel
      these caitiffs; nor, lest to the damned they then
      gave cause to boast, receives them the deep hell.

      A more modern-sounding translation: "They are mixed with that repulsive choir of angels … undecided in neutrality. Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out, but even Hell itself would not receive them for fear the wicked there might glory over them".—Dante's Inferno, trans. Mark Musa, p. 21 (1971)
  • I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.
    • Robert F. Kennedy, "Day of Affirmation", address delivered at the University of Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966. Congressional Record, June 6, 1966, vol. 112, p. 12430
  • Even in war moral power is to physical as three parts out of four.
    • Attributed to Napoleon I; reported in Maturin M. Ballou, Treasury of Thought (1899), p. 407. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989). A handwritten note in Congressional Research Service files says that the War Department Library had searched many times without success for a different version: "Morale is to material as is the ratio of three to one".
  • Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
    • Albert Schweitzer, "Civilization and Ethics", Preface, The Philosophy of Civilization, trans. C. T. Campion, part 2 (1949, reissued 1981), p. 79.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

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  • Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.
  • All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

See also

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