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Quotes about morality

501 quotes from 241 people

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Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
Eleanor Roosevelt1884–1962
If I must choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919America and the World War (1915)
- War & Peace
War with evil; but show no spirit of malignity toward the man who may be responsible for the evil. Put it out of his power to do wrong.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919
- Good & Evil
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1910)
- Good & Evil
The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919The Man with the Muck Rake (1906)
- Good & Evil
The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919The Man with the Muck Rake (1906)
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778The Social Contract (1762), Book I, Chapter IVIn context
- Liberty
You may either win your peace, or buy it:⁠—win it, by resistance to evil;⁠—buy it, by compromise with evil.
John Ruskin1819–1900The Two Paths (1859)
- Good & Evil
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
- Good & Evil
Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970The Conquest of Happiness, Ch. 4: Boredom and Excitement (1930)
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism
- Anti-Religion
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918), Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy
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
I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.
Jonas Salk1914–1995Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
- Good & Evil
Malice is of a low Stature, but it hath very long Arms.
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax1633–1695Political Thoughts and Reflections
- Good & Evil