Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

If someone was going to kill someone dear to you, and you could stop that person by killing them instead, would you kill them, knowing it was an effective way to save your loved one?

People today…it seems they are good, or sometimes evil, mostly by inertia, not by choice.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and...

Just handle what’s in front of you now. and the future will take care of itself. Otherwise, you’ll spend most of your life wondering which foot you’ll use to step off the curb when you’re...

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness,...

Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall. While denying it, one gradually starts to believe that he is the authority, or that he possesses great moral dominion over...

Sustainable change, after all, depends not upon compliance with external mandates or blind adherence to regulation, but rather upon the pursuit of the greater good.

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held...

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one...

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both morality and invigoration.

Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

A world that is intellectually mature but morally infantile is on the road to ruin.

When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral...

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used...

Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral.

…the standard for moral behaviour must be part of God’s nature. He did not create morality, he is morality.

There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it...

You think you’re superior to the others, don’t you? We’ll you’re not. In fact you’re worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing...

For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do,...

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.

Triviality is evil – triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly...

One enjoys the good things more to the extent that one goes to them after having labored in advance, for labors are a sauce for good things

by confusing life with play-acting and play-acting with life, one may perhaps construct a tolerable moral world from shattered fragments of the past

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...

If laws were real they wouldn’t need to be enforced, because if they were real they couldn’t be broken. Try breaking the law of gravity. Now that’s a law. Laws made by man are rules...

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human...

If you have money but not love you will somehow manage, but if you don’t have both then you are in serious trouble.

I can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point find yourself doing something that at one point you swore you’d never do. You’ll do it for the sake of getting high, either directly...

You can’t be spontaneous within reason.

I have gained this by philosophy … I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.

Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus...

There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Nada importa hace mucho que lo se, así que no merece la pena hacer nada eso acabo de descubrirlo.

It can have no bearing on the matter before us. Sam Westing manipulated people, cheated workers, bribed officials, stole ideas, but Sam Westing never smoked or drank or placed a bet. Give me a bookie...

How simple love would be, Younger Brother, if we only had to bestow it on those who deserved it. Yet what would it be worth? If you gave a poor man a silver coin then...

People have always wanted to ‘improve’ human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about...

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.