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Quotes about morality

501 quotes from 241 people

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Depraved custom is just a kind of general pestilence in which men perish not the less that they fall in a crowd.
John Calvin1509–1564Institutes of the Christian Religion, Prefatory Address to King Francis I, p. 23
I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day.
Albert Camus1913–1960The Fall (1956)
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
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
Albert Camus1913–1960The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), “The Absurd Man”
- Philosophy
There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; — for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881The French Revolution. A History (1837), Pt. III, Bk. I, ch. 4.
- Good & Evil
“Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”
Lewis Carroll1832–1898Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Chapter IXIn context
My success and my misfortunes, the bright and the dark days I have gone through, everything has proved to me that in this world, either physical or moral, good comes out of evil just as well as evil comes out of good.
Giacomo Casanova1725–1798Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)
- Experience
- Good & Evil
It is evil things that we will be fighting against⁠—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution⁠—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
Neville Chamberlain1869–1940Broadcast from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street (3 September 1939)
- Good & Evil
- War & Peace
Right action is better than knowledge; but in order to do what is right, we must know what is right.
CCharlemagne747–814De Litteris Colendis (c. 780–800); translation from T. H. Huxley, Science and Education (1893)
- Knowledge
The world is not destroyed by villains and conflagrations, but by hate and malice and all this spiteful tattling.
Anton Chekhov1860–1904Uncle Vanya (1897), Act II, spoken by HelenaIn context
- Anger
- Good & Evil
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936A Short History of England (1917)
- Freedom
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936In The Illustrated London News (23 October 1909)
- Good & Evil
It’s not that we don’t have enough scoundrels to curse; it’s that we don’t have enough good men to curse them.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936
What I find terrifying is the detachment and equanimity with which we view and discuss an unbearable tragedy.
Noam Chomskyborn 1928“On Resistance”, The New York Review of Books, December 7, 1967.