Quotes about morality

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

— Jean Anouilh

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

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

— Aristotle

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Sir Alfred Jules Ayer

I'm as pure as the driven slush.

— Tallulah Bankhead

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.

— Georges Bataille

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

— Aneurin Bevan

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.

— Patrick Buchanan

Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure.

— Lord Byron

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.

— Angela Carter

The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

I cannot believe that this country cannot come together around some values what these kids need is a moral life... the issue is not ideas, it is conduct. The real question is how we reach these young people morally, and what do we bring to them.

— Robert Coles

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

The higher the building the lower the morals.

— Noel Coward

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Frank Dane

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

— Denis Diderot

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.

— Joan Didion

We moralize among ruins.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

— William J. Durant

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Feoude

It is almost systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no difference between right and wrong.

— Anatole France

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— James A. Froude

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.

— Emma Goldman

Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

— Oliver Goldsmith

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Terry Hands

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

— Roy Hattersley

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— Ernest Hemingway

The end never really justifies the meanness.

— E. Duane Hulse

However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.

— Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

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

— Basil Hume

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

— Aldous Huxley

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.

— Aldous Huxley

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying

— Thomas H. Huxley

For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.

— William James

Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.

— Thomas Jefferson

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.

— Pamela Hansford Johnson

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

— Immanuel Kant

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

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

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

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

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Walter Lippmann

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

— John Locke

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.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

— James Russell Lowell

Might was the measure of right.

— F. L. Lucan

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

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.

— Horace Mann

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

— H. L. Mencken

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?

— Liam Neeson

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Jean Paul

We become moral when we are unhappy.

— Marcel Proust

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

— Ayn Rand

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.

— Ronald Reagan

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

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.

— John Selden

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

The aim of morality is to give people a standard of action and a motive to work by which, they will not intensify each person's selfishness, but raise them up above it.

— Cecil J. Sharpe

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

— George Bernard Shaw

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

— George Bernard Shaw

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— Lord Shawcross

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

— Rick Shuman

Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.

— Vittorio De Sica

Mercy to living beings, self restraint, truth, honesty, chastity and contentment, right faith and knowledge, and austerity are but the entourage of morality.

— Sila-Prabhrita

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

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.

— Susan Sontag

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

— Henry David Thoreau

Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Source Unknown

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.

— Robert Warshow

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

— George Washington

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

— Simone Weil

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

— H.G. Wells

Morality is the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.

— Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.

— Oscar Wilde

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

— Young

Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have.

— Andrew Young

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

— Johann Georg Zimmermann

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

— Albert Einstein

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

— Alan W. Watts

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

— Henry David Thoreau

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Edna Ferber