Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right...

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...

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

To act morally is not to act out of fear of punishment; it is not to act as one is commanded to act. Rather, it is to act as one ought to act. And how...

ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to...

We stay the same as we’ve always been, keeping to the path we’ve walked our whole lives. Paths that carry so much importance and perceived stability that we are utterly convinced it is the only...

And I bet you murdered Michael Wayland and his little boy, too. Threw their bones in with my grandparents’ so that my mother would think you and Jace were dead. Put your necklace around Michael...

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for...

we (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

Simple life EthosIf you must judge. Let your moral beacon guide you to a decision you can live with,If you feel generous, give with humility so others could live with dignity,If you became aware of...

Peaceful disputes are maintained when men sincerely believe that they are morally, logically correct about the issues at hand. It is when neither side is really certain that wars are instigated.

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any...

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

Uma virtude deve ser nossa invenção, nossa defesa e nossa necessidade pessoais: tomada em qualquer outro sentido, não passa de um perigo. Aquilo que não é uma condição vital é prejudicial à vida: uma virtude...

The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire...

A man who does not question his own judgment, society, and who flourishes between deceit and bewilderment, fails his moral responsibility as a rational being.

Moral ideas about what constitutes a meritorious or meaningful use of one’s life and opportunities produce specific attitudes towards drug use and intoxication.

Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.

At the same time, however, the necessity for economic change in our countries has led us to conceive laws and accept traditions often at the expense of the individual person. Just when many are becoming...

Us atheist people, we believe we have to act properly and honestly for a moral principle and not because we expect an award in Paradise.

Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.

For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a...

Wars are all fought by men who either believe they are right or who have no other choice. How they fight defines who they are when the blood stops flowing.

I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.

The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary,...

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost.

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...

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over...

We live in the present all the time and the past does not matter anymore. Only if we can understand this in the past, when the past is the present, we would be able to...

Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he...

Sometimes I just need to be alone with what I believe in.

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s...

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...

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...

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

[Women] complain about many clerks who attribute all sorts of faults to them and who compose works about them in rhyme, prose, and verse, criticizing their conduct in a variety of different ways. They then...

Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.

We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have...

ABC of a wonderful life: A man of the right ATTITUDE is GOOD; A man of the right ATTITUDE+the correct BEHAVIOR is BETTER; But, a man of the right ATTITUDE+the correct BEHAVIOR +an upright CHARACTER...

If untruths become part of our language—untruths that in context are intended to be interpreted as polite expressions or figure of speech—then each person is left to decide for themselves the meaning of any sentence....

The victim is always morally superior to the master; that is the victim’s ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men;...

God bids you not to commit lechery, that is, not to have sex with any woman except your wife. You ask of her that she should not have sex with anyone except you — yet...

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns...

It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved...

Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we’re born free of sin and free of guilt. It’s just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept...

Those who are compassionate when they should be tough will be tough when they should be compassionate.

Sometimes there’s other reason for helping, other than personal gain or benefit,” added Sam softly. “Friendship, companionship, trust and love are not confined to light alone…they are harder won, fewer seen…but no less real.