Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about morality

501 quotes from 241 people

Most readBy personPage 1 of 34

All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke1729–1797
- Good & Evil
People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people may accuse you of selfish motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you may win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People who really want help may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway. Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway.
Mother Teresa1910–1997
A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Religion and Science (1930)
- Anti-Religion
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949), p. 292
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
- Education
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784
There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live.
JAJames Truslow Adams1878–1949Often credited to John Adams
- Education
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865
- Religion
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal1623–1662
- Anti-Religion
- Good & Evil
Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.
Martin Luther King Jr.1929–19681968 version
I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying ‘flee at once⁠—all is discovered.’ They all left town immediately.
Mark Twain1835–1910
Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
Augustine of Hippo354–430VIII, 7
If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking…the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
Ayn Rand1905–1982
- Faith
- Truth & Lies
I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell⁠—you see, I have friends in both places.
Mark Twain1835–1910