Moral principle is the foundation of law. — Ronald Dworkin
Morality and immorality are not defined by man's changing attitudes and social customs. They are determined by the God of the universe, whose timeless standards cannot be ignored with impunity. — James Dobson
Morality is a private and costly luxury. — Henry Adams
What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. — Ernest Hemingway
The key to living a moral life is this: Do nothing in private that you would be ashamed to discuss openly with your mother. — J. P. Morgan
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others. — Charles Darwin
universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality. — Arthur Schopenhauer
There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the wooden idols of long ago, they are the work of human hands, and what man has made, man can destroy! — Anton Szandor LaVey
When a man is guided by the principles of reciprocity and consciousness, he is not far from the moral law. Whatever you don't wish for yourself don't do unto others. — Confucius
Conventionality is not morality. — Charlotte Bronte
When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable. — Emile Durkheim
Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice. — Leon Blum
No moral system can rest solely on authority. — A.J. Ayer
Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals. — Horace Mann
Maturity is learning to walk away from people and situation that threaten your peace of mind, self respect, values, morals and self worth.
Moral Law Quotes
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. — Immanuel Kant
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. Improve the World Through Music. — Plato
You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way. — Emmeline Pankhurst
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.
Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws. — Thurgood Marshall
The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount…If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State. — Harry S. Truman
There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes. — John Dewey
Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. — Immanuel Kant
What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them? — Socrates
Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the social and the moral. — Catharine Beecher
Moral Conscience Quotes
Seven Deadly Sins Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Science without humanity Knowledge without character Politics without principle Commerce without morality Worship without sacrifice. — Mahatma Gandhi
They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience. — Joseph Conrad
Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself. — Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins. — Thomas Aquinas
Private Manning is the world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to 'a moral choice.' His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free. — John Pilger
Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. — Theodore Parker
Our humanity is trapped by moral adolescents. We have too many men of science, too few men of God. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom and power without conscience. — Omar N. Bradley
...but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. — Harper Lee
Moral Life Quotes
The most important thing in life is to dare. The most complicated thing in life is to be afraid. The smartest thing in the world is to try to be a moral person. — Shimon Peres
Females in our generation morals are just out the window. Materialistic things aren't life. I'd rather walk in the rain with a man who treats me like a queen than to ride in a Benz with a man who treats me like crap. — Jhene Aiko
When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. — Frederic Bastiat
Bad company ruins good morals.
Do not try to fix whatever comes in your life. Fix yourself in such a way that whatever comes, you will be fine. — Jaggi Vasudev
Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. — C. S. Lewis
Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it. — Emile Durkheim
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality — Antonio Gramsci
We have to build a better man before we can build a better society. — Paul Tillich
Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to. — Emile Durkheim
To me dogs are not the students, not the ones that need training. To me a dog is a teacher of life, who teaches us the principles of the most important moral values; honesty, integrity, loyalty, trust, respect and love. — Cesar Millan
Moral Conduct Quotes
Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears. — Albert Bandura
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
Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage. — William Lloyd Garrison
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct. — Paul Ricoeur
When you are around people who have money, you realise money isn't that impressive, it's about your class, morals and how you conduct yourself. — Anthony Joshua
Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years. — Nicholas Murray Butler
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? — George Washington
A responsibility to be a role model as a father yes, as a man, as a public figure, yes. That responsibility just leads me to do what I feel is right and to conduct myself with the moral standards, principles, and integrity that were instilled in me by my family. — T.I.
Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real. Therefore, atheism shifts the basis of morality from faith in god to obligations of social living. Moral conduct is not a passport to heaven; it is social necessity. — Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints. — Hans Hartung
Moral Ethics Quotes
Do the right thing because it is right. — Immanuel Kant
How sweet to be a Cloud. Floating in the Blue! — A. A. Milne
Solidarity is based on the principle that we are willing to put ourselves at risk to protect each other. — Starhawk
I'd say a man is someone who is strong-minded, moral, genuine, just a good human beeing.
The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion. — Bill Nye
If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. — Robert Noyce
My selective memory of what drinking was like told me that standing at the bar in a pub, on a summer's evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke and a shotgun, contemplating suicide. — Eric Clapton
Stand for something. Don't quest for popularity at the expense of morality and ethics and honesty. — Howard Cosell
People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. — Stephen King
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality. — Arthur Schopenhauer
You can’t have a moral society without sound money. — Robert Breedlove
Moral Behavior Quotes
Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail as you surely will adjust your lives, not the standards. — Ted Koppel
In my mind of course natural disaster like tsunami, and these things, also I think indirectly may relate to human behavior. But then major sort of problems actually they're due to a lack of moral principle. — Dalai Lama
Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The test, surely, of a creed is not the ability of those who accept it to announce their faith; its test is its ability to change their behavior in the ordinary round of daily life. Judged by that test, I know no religion that has a moral claim upon the allegiance of men. — Harold Laski
Our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding and behavior of large portions of the youth population in the United States today. — William Damon
There's a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone and it's where most of life happens. — Scott Adams
There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. — Viktor E. Frankl
Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discussions of morality. It may help us all to think a little more carefully and rationally. — Patricia Churchland
I don't believe there is any such definition, there is no such thing as evil, only moral judgments based on what society believes to be wrong behavior. — Nikolas Schreck
Samurai culture did exist really, for hundreds of years and the notion of people trying to create some sort of a moral code, the idea that there existed certain behaviors that could be celebrated and that could be operative in a life. — Edward Zwick
Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs. — Emmeline Pankhurst
There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life:
1) To produce them or
2) To plunder them.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. — Paul Valery
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exulted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues. — John Maynard Keynes
We [Israel people] always blame Moses, that he was our greatest leader and one of the most gifted people in the world. He brought us the moral code and so on, belief in one God, but then he was a bad navigator. He brought us to the only part of the Middle East without any gas, without any oil. — Benjamin Netanyahu
And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role. — Clarence Thomas
The responsibility of the executive is (1) to create and maintain a sense of purpose and moral code for the organization; (2) to establish systems of formal and informal communication; and (3) to ensure the willingness of people to cooperate. — Chester Barnard
Perhaps the time has come to formulate a moral code which would govern our relations with the great creatures of the sea as well as with those on dry land. That this will come to pass is my dear wish. — Jacques Yves Cousteau
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 reflecting the current status of his moral codes. As he alters and whittles away his morality, casting bits and pieces aside, his codes change to reflect it. — Boyd Rice
The confessing church of American Ragamuffins needs to join Magdalene and Peter in witnessing that Christianity is not primarily a moral code but a grace-laden mystery; it is not essentially a philosophy of love but a love affair; it is not keeping rules with clenched fists but receiving a gift with open hands. — Brennan Manning
While women were tortured, drowned and burned by the thousands, scarce one wizard to a hundred was ever condemned ... The same distinction of sex appears in our own day. One code of morals for men, another for women. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. — John Maynard Keynes
Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept. — Camille Paglia
The importance of a high moral code, which is at the foundation of the Scout movement, cannot be stressed too highly. — Nelson Mandela
The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality - which became America's - was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect. — Hugh Hefner
All so-called revealed religions consist mainly of three portions, a cosmogony more or less mythical, a history more or less falsified, and a moral code more or less pure. — Richard Francis Burton
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions. — Will Durant
I would always encourage people of any age not to be so quick to follow other people's truths but to search and follow your own moral code and live by your own integrity, and mostly just be brave. — Jewel Kilcher
"Family" this and "family" that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way "states' rights" was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties. — John Waters
Science is morally neutral, but social science shows us that some moral codes are better than others. — Mario Bunge
There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws... What is the difference between the two?...An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The morality code that remains after the religion that produced it is rejected is like the perfume that lingers in an empty bottle. — Sigrid Undset
Beauty is a living abiding presence completely untouchable by all the devices of man, such as moral codes, creeds, intellectual analysis, games and cliches, the acquisitive instinct, or lust for anything whatsoever. — Lawren Harris
I guess to me religion is a kind of moral code. — Vera Rubin
A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. — Martin Luther
Now, more than any time previous in human history, we must arm ourselves with an ethical code so that each of us will be aware that he is protecting the moral merchandise absent of which life is not worth living. — Sholem Asch
There's nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. — Ayn Rand
moral codes and standards in our societies very rarely apply to all people equally. This is the most damning proof of how immoral such codes and standards really are. — Nawal El Saadawi
Irrespective of whether we are believers or agnostics, whether we believe in God or karma, moral ethics is a code which everyone is able to pursue. — Dalai Lama
You cannot ask which system is the better because you cannot standardize one system for the whole of the world. You cannot have one stereotyped code of morality for every country. One system may work very well in one country and very badly in another. You cannot grow a tropical flower in a cold climate. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regimen or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart. — Elizabeth Lesser
Social confusion has now reached a point at which the pursuit of immorality turns out to be more exhausting than compliance with the old moral codes. — Denis de Rougemont
. . . nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction. — Suzanne La Follette
A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code; it contained many statutes . . . of universal application-laws essential to the existence of men in society, and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws. — John Quincy Adams
I try not to think in terms of good and bad but more in terms of helpful or unhelpful in regards to specific moral codes and goals. — Richard Brancatisano
The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. — Ayn Rand
Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor. — William O. Douglas
Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists' morale or their cause while the hijack lasted. — Margaret Thatcher
Being an atheist makes someone a clearer thinking, fairer person. They [atheists] are not doing things to be rewarded in heaven; they're doing things because they're right, because they live by a moral code. — Ricky Gervais
It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it. — Jose Ortega y Gasset
In Conclusion
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