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Quotes about morality

501 quotes from 241 people

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There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
- Advice
The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.
Michel de Montaigne1533–1592Essais (wr. 1571–92; pub. 1580–95), Book I, Ch. 22. Of Custom (tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842)
A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it.
William Penn1644–1718Some Fruits of Solitude (1693), nos. 537–539
- Good & Evil
Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
Hermann Hesse1877–1962Siddhartha (1922)
- Good & Evil
The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
Arthur Miller1915–2005Paris Review (Summer 1966)
- Good & Evil
All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans.
Cory Doctorowborn 1971Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts (2014), p. 317
- Good & Evil
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
Arthur Schopenhauer1788–1860The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2 (trans. E. F. J. Payne), p. 230
- Intelligence
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
It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
Milton Friedman1912–2006America’s Drug Forum interview (1991)
- Government
Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.
David Graeber1961–2020Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! (2000)
- Politics
Neither moral conceptions nor art-forms have an eternity before them. How much are we really in duty bound to pin our faith to? Who will guarantee me that on Jupiter two and two do not make five?
Henrik Ibsen1828–1906Letter to Georg Brandes (17 February 1871), as translated in Henrik Ibsen: Björnstjerne Björnson. Critical Studies (1899) by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes
Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.
Peter Singerborn 1946The Most Good You Can Do (2015), Preface, p. vii
- Charity
As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
Reinhold Niebuhr1892–1971Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), pp. 8-9
- Power
Speciesism⁠—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term⁠—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.
Peter Singerborn 1946Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal
- Animals
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!
Thomas Hardy1840–1928Jude the Obscure (1895), Pt. VI, ch. IIIIn context