Motivational Quotes

Morality

Might was the measure of right.

- Lucan, F. L.

Best Quotes about Morality

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

Bertrand Russell

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

'Wrong'is one of those concepts that depends on witnesses.

Scott Adams

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

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

Huxley, Aldous

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Carlyle, Thomas

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

10.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

Seneca

11.

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

Hands, Terry

12.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

13.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Greene, Graham

15.

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.

16.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

17.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

18.

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

19.

Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.

Warshow, Robert

20.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

21.

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

Kraus, Karl

22.

No author can be as moral as his work and no preacher as pious as his sermons.

Paul, Jean

23.

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

Feoude

24.

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

Bertrand Russell

25.

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

Dane, Frank

26.

In Los Angeles, it's like they jog for two hours a day and then they think they're morally right. That's when you want to choke people, you know?

Neeson, Liam

27.

Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.

Mann, Horace

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.

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

30.

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

31.

To give a man full knowledge of morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.

Locke, John

32.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Kant, Immanuel

33.

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

34.

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

Ferber, Edna

35.

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

Mencken, H. L.

36.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

Lawrence, D. H.

37.

There are few things more disturbing than to find, in somebody we detest, a moral quality which seems to us demonstrably superior to anything we ourselves possess. It augurs not merely an unfairness on the part of creation, but a lack of artistic judgment. Sainthood is acceptable only in saints.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

38.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it , they are wrong.

Robert Louis Stevenson

39.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

40.

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

Hazlitt, William

41.

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.

Anouilh, Jean

42.

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

Sallust

43.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

44.

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

45.

The new so called morality has too often the old immorality condoned.

Shawcross, Lord

46.

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

47.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

Sontag, Susan

48.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

49.

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

Lippmann, Walter

50.

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