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Quotes about morality

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As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
Arthur C. Clarke1917–2008Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (1967)
- Science
If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.
Charlotte Brontë1816–1855Jane Eyre (1847), Ch. 8 (Helen Burns)In context
He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ.
Thomas Jefferson1743–1826Letter to William Canby (18 September 1813)
- Religion
There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Immanuel Kant1724–1804Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Ch. II
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17 December, 1920
- Good & Evil
- Power
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing⁠—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
Leo Tolstoy1828–1910Path of Life (1909), p. 210
There is no outward mark of politeness that does not have a profound moral reason. The right education would be that which taught the outward mark and the moral reason together.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749–1832Elective Affinities (1809), Bk. II, Ch. 5, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1971), p. 195
- Education
It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.
Helen Keller1880–1968Optimism (1903)
- Good & Evil
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand1905–1982Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
- Good & Evil
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant1724–1804Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Translated by Lewis White Beck
- Nature
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn1918–2008Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, “The Struggle Intensifies”
- Justice
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
Albert Camus1913–1960Said at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg (1948); reported in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (translation by Justin O’Brien, 1961), p. 73
- Children
- Good & Evil
He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars;
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer:
For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
William Blake1757–1827Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 3, plate 55, line 60
- Charity
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 7 “Victory” (p. 165; epigram)
- Good & Evil
While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Essay 1, Section 10 (tr. Walter Kaufmann)