Motivational Quotes

Morality

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

- A. J. Ayer

Best Quotes about Morality

Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.

Buchanan, Patrick

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Mencken, H. L.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

James A. Forude

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

The biggest threat to our well-being is the absence of moral clarity and purpose.

Shuman, Rick

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

King Jr. Martin Luther

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it's set a rolling it must increase.

Colton, Charles Caleb

10.

A woman can look both moral and exciting -- if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

Ferber, Edna

11.

A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

12.

Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

13.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

Jonathan Haidt

14.

There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.

Lippmann, Walter

15.

Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.

John Ruskin

16.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

17.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one that we preach, but do not practice, and another that we practice, but seldom preach.

Russell, Bertrand

19.

The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.

Froude, James A.

20.

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.

Bataille, Georges

21.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

G. K. Chesterton

22.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

23.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

24.

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.

Goldman, Emma

25.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

Lao-Tzu

26.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

Moral choices do not depend on personal preference and private decision but on right reason and, I would add, divine order.

Hume, Basil

29.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

30.

The great rule of moral conduct is next to God, respect time.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

31.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Diderot, Denis

32.

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.

Lowell, James Russell

33.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Rand, Ayn

35.

Many people convince themselves if it is economically necessary, it's morally right. That's not always the case.

36.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

37.

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

Crowley, Aleister

38.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

The soul is the captain and ruler of the life of morals.

Sallust

40.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle

41.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

42.

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

Voltaire

43.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

44.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Socrates

45.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Didion, Joan

46.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

Hands, Terry

47.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

48.

A set of rules laid out by professionals to show the way they would like to act if it was profitable.

Dane, Frank

49.

A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.

Feoude

50.

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

Selden, John