As a rule,I believe people shouldn’t follow rules;rules should follow people.

Hard to say what’s right when all I wanna do is wrong.

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: ‘Do...

Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.

Character is how you treat people who can’t do anything for you in return.Integrity is how you act when you think nobody is looking.

Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… “Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we...

If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.

Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness…In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the...

We all have vices, visible and invisible. Some we deliberately keep secret. Others we don’t even realize or we refuse to admit we have…Vices can be lots of fun, or they can turn your life into a living hell. Accept them for what they are, just another aspect of the mind’s creation, and you can...

Companies’ motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no...

Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser; of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.

Show them that love is greater,” Betsie replied. In that moment, Corrie realized her sister’s focus was on the prison guard, not the victim she was watching. Betsie saw the world through a different lens. She considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer.

Science discovered long ago that carbon is a source of life. The ashes of my faith have prepared the ground for the planting of seeds that have produced new forms of truth, morality and meaning on my own terms, not according to the dogma laid down by religious ruffians or a vengeful God. If, as...

L’avantage de tenir un discours moral, c’est que ce type de propos a été soumis à une censure si forte, et depuis tant d’années, qu’il provoque un effet d’incongruité et attire aussitôt l’attention de l’interlocuteur ; l’inconvénient, c’est que celui-ci ne parvient jamais à vous prendre tout à fait au sérieux. (La possibilité d’une île,...

We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep...

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not–that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine...

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views...

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then...

Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good...

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn’t the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had – being sorry you got caught?

Oh, no. It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people?” says Peeta. “It costs everything you are.

Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will...

Even in war there should be lines you didn’t cross.

Marx hated weakness in men, and considered the making of moral judgements as the last resort of the weak. To say ‘That is morally wrong’ is implicitly to say ‘ I am powerless to stop that, so I will inveigh against it’.

Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we...

What have I always believed?That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

Suppose it should turn out that no such person as Christ ever lived. What harm would that do justice or mercy? Wouldn’t the tear of pity be as pure as now, and wouldn’t justice, holding aloft her scales, from which she blows even the dust of prejudice, be as noble, as admirable as now? Is...

Justice is the only worship.Love is the only priest.Ignorance is the only slavery.Happiness is the only good.The time to be happy is now,The place to be happy is here,The way to be happy is to make others so.Wisdom is the science of happiness.

Theology is a superstition—Humanity a religion.

This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.

Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.

Are you a man with a conscience, or just a shark who will die when you stop moving forward?

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

Chastity … has, even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

If you say there is no such thing as morality in absolute terms, then child abuse is not evil, it just may not happen to be your thing.

Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, ‘Duck.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

The reason many are loathe to acknowledge the possibility of absolute truth is not simply because they do not wish to accept the possibility of the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing deity. It is because they do not want to accept the consequences that follow from the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing deity as the...

If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.

Given our obsession with self, it is hardly surprising we think it is fine for us to live in a world with malleable moral markers, as long as we get our own way without being bullied by others into accepting their way of doing things. We want others to respect moral boundaries that we want...

God made me this way.” God has made it very clear that He does not want you to indulge your desires, but to honor Him by keeping your mind and body pure. Finally, seek professional Christian counseling. With time and effort, you can come to enjoy normal, heterosexual relations with your spouse. There is hope.

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.