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Quotes about morality

501 quotes from 241 people

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We must not indulge in unfavourable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.
Walter Savage Landor1775–1864Imaginary Conversations (1824-1829), “Barrow and Newton”
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le Guin1929–2018The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 6
Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.
Gerald Stanley Lee1862–1944Crowds (1913), Book IV, Chapter X.
Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Harper Lee1926–2016To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Pt. 1, Ch. 10 (Atticus Finch)
- Animals
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
Primo Levi1919–1987Appendix (1976) to If This Is a Man, as translated in The New Republic
- Good & Evil
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
Surely what a man does when he is caught off his guard is the best evidence as to what sort of man he is.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Mere Christianity
- Virtue
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963The Case for Christianity
You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Mere Christianity (1952), Book I, Chapter 5, “We Have Cause to Be Uneasy”
- God
You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Mere Christianity
When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
Whenever you find a man who says he doesn’t believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963The Case for Christianity
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Mere Christianity