moral dilemmas Quotes

“At first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back.”

“When we stop long enough to think about it, we realize that our dilemma goes deeper than shortage of time; it is basically a problem of priorities.”

“It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmness; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindness repented of in permanent malignities.”

“When he was close enough and behind a tree where he could clearly see the monkey, he raised his rifle and aimed. Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: ‘If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don’t, your father will die.’ The monkey resumed its position, chewing its food, and every so often scratched its head or the side of its belly. What would you do if you were the hunter?”

“What had been the use of promising one another that they would not on any account set the Knight free, if they were now to do so the first time he happened to call upon a name they really cared about?”

″‘Once and for all,’ said the prisoner, ‘I adjure you to set me free. By all fears and all loves, by the bright skies of Overland, by the great Lion, by Aslan himself, I charge you—‘”

“On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I gonna say? That it was my job? My job?”

“You can’t rob a thief, can you? I never robbed no citizens.”

“I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all the hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what’s in a man’s heart.”

“He knew taking money was wrong. His nannan had told him never to steal. He didn’t want to steal. But he didn’t have a solitary dime in his pocket.”

“What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions…”

“You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer. A terrible terrible thing to consider. And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprive of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good. So I shall like to think. So, God help us all…”

“What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems. ”

″...if I die tonight I’m in a state of sin for stealing and I could go straight to hell stuffed with fish and chips but it’s Saturday and if the priests are still in the confession boxes I can clear my soul after my feed.”

She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.