morals Quotes

“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.”

“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”

“I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the right thing.”

“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”

“All right then, I’ll go to hell”

“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

“And the moral of that is—’Oh, ‘tis love, ‘tis love, that makes the world go round!’” “Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!” “Ah well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, “and the moral of that is—‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.’”

“And the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’”

“A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

“The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred.”

“The sincere wish to be good is half the battle.”

“If I didn’t care about doing right and didn’t feel uncomfortable doing wrong, I should get on capitally.”

“Dehumanizing and holding people accountable are mutually exclusive...Challenging ourselves to live by higher standards requires constant diligence and awareness.”

“Much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts--with words and images...We must never tolerate dehumanization--the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history. When we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric or promote dehumanizing images, we diminish our own humanity in the process...[it] says volumes about who we are and the degree to which we’re operating in our integrity.”

“I beg of you,” said Bilbo stammering and standing on one foot, “to accept this gift!” and he brought out a necklace of silver and pearls that Dain had given him at their parting. “In what way have I earned such a gift, O hobbit?” said the king. “Well, er, I thought, don’t you know,” said Bilbo rather confused, “that, er, some little return should be made for your, er, hospitality. I mean even a burglar has his feelings. I have drunk much of your wine and eaten much of your bread.” “I will take your gift, O Bilbo the Magnificent,” said the king gravely.

“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.”

Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.

To owe life to a malefactor . . . to be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice . . . to betray society in order to be true to his own conscience; that all these absurdities . . . should accumulate on himself—this is what prostrated him.

“Pure logic can lead you to conclusions that are ethically wrong, whereas if you are moral and righteous, that will ensure that you don’t act shamefully.”

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

“I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.”

Regard to good morals than to great abilities; for, since government is necessary to mankind, they believe, that the common size of human understanding is fitted to some station or other; and that Providence never intended to make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime.

“Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”

“Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”

“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

“On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.”

“Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues – and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins - one after the other.”

“Lady Chiltern is a woman of the very highest principles, I am glad to say. I am a little too old now, myself, to trouble about setting a good example, but I always admire people who do.”

“Circumstances should never alter principles!”

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

“It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.”

“I know what’s legal not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.”

“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”

“You see, though nothing mattered to me, I could feel pain, for instance. If any one had struck me it would have hurt me. It was the same morally: if anything very pathetic happened, I should have felt pity just as I used to do in old days when there were things in life that did matter to me.”

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?”

″‘I do not know, nor do I wish to know, about such contracts,’ [Mrs. Pentstemmon] said. Her cane wobbled again, as if she might be shuddering. Her mouth quirked into a line, suggesting she had unexpectedly bitten on a peppercorn. ‘But I now see,’ she said, ‘what has happened to the Witch. She made a contract with a fire demon and, over the years, that demon has taken control of her. Demons do not understand good and evil. But they can be bribed into a contract, provided the human offers them something valuable, something only humans have.‘”

“‘Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.’”

“The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night—because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.‘”

“I’m actually educated to think that morals and ethics do not necessarily go hand in hand.”

“It was puzzling that such a muddy little river like the Rio Grande should make such a difference in terms of what was lawful and what not.”

″‘Don’t you talk to me that way,’ he says. ‘Don’t you question me. You don’t know anything about my life’.”

“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”

“The morality of my activities escapes me.”

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was...”

“You don’t know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor.”

“I’m a copper ... as honest as you could expect ... in a world where it’s going out of style.”

“Evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise.”

“I’ve seen what you can do to a jury. Twist and tangle them. Nobody’s forgotten the Endicott Publishing case—where you made the jury believe the obscenity was in their own minds, not on the printed page. It was immoral what you did to that jury. Tricking them. Judgment by confusion. Think you can get away with it here?”

“In the end, all men die. How you lived will be far more important to the Almighty than what you accomplished”

“It has been said that the Negroes do not connect morals with religion. The historian would like to know what race or nation does such a thing. Certainly the whites with whom the Negroes have come into contact have not done so.”

“What makes a man a ‘sophist’ is not his faculty, but his moral purpose.”

“The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren’t everything.”

“We who bore the mark, felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take. All of these faiths and teachings seemed to us already dead and useless. The only duty and destiny we acknowledged was that each one of us should become so completely himself, so utterly faithful to the active seed which nature planted within him, that in living out its growth he could be surprised by nothing unknown to come.”

“Moral: The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist.”

“Every man has his price!”

“It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society;”

“Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth? ”

“The older monk quickly picked her up and put her on his back, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other side. She didn’t thank the older monk, she just shoved him out of the way and departed.”

“No matter what you step in, keep walking along and singing your song... because its all good.”

“There are, if I may so say, three powerful spirits, which have from time to time, moved on the face of the waters, and given a predominant impulse to the moral sentiments and energies of mankind. These are the spirits of liberty, of religion, and of honor.”

“There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.”

“The decade is loose and the morals are looser.”

“Moral compasses meant nothing in the face of starvation.”

“You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.”

“But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that? Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse than what you do?”

“Within certain limits, bad thought and bad morals can be good literature. If so great a man as Tolstoy could not demonstrate the contrary, I doubt whether anyone else can either.”

“Don’t ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?”

“The moral is that little Boys Should not be given dangerous Toys.”

“One must live by her own moral code, not follow like a sheep, blindly.”

“They taught me not to hate. To never say I can’t. To never lie.”

“As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.”

‘Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.’

Marilla was as fond of morals as the Duchess in Wonderland, and was firmly convinced that one should be tacked on to every remark made to a child who was being brought up.

“And the moral of that is—‘The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.‘”