Quotes about morality

How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.

Over the past few decades, we've gotten into the bad habit of looking to the government to solve every personal and social crisis that comes along. People have really come to misunderstand government's scope. There's only so much it can do. For one thing, it's a terrible social regulator. And morals and values aren't things that legislation can even touch. You can't legislate morality. It doesn't work.

The conqueror always assumes that his moral superiority—rather than his ferocious greed—is what has allowed him to triumph.

There is less danger, gentlemen, in living according to a set of high moral principles than most politicians believe.

Gandhi had been right. There was only one way to behave, even if it seemed, in the short term, against one’s self-interest. Surely it was in one’s self-interest in the long term to exhibit generosity, humanity, kindness and a sense of justice to one’s fellow men. It was cynicism of Beesley’s kind which had, after all, led to the threatened extinction of the whole human race. There could be no such thing s a “righteous” war, for war was by its very nature an act of injustice against the individual, but there could be such a thing as an “unrighteous” war—an evil war, a war begun by men who were utterly corrupt, both morally and intellectually. I had begun to think that it was a definition of those who would make war—that whatever motives they claimed, whatever ideals they promoted, whatever “threat” they referred to, they could not be excused—because of their actions they could only be of a degenerate and immoral character.

“The whole question of morality…”

“Is as nothing when one’s stomach rumbles,” said Jhary.

By acting as they would act, we become what they are. And if we are what they are, then there is little point in resisting them!

“It’s like prostitution.”

“It’s a lot like prostitution, isn’t it?”

“You see nothing wrong…?”

“The customer’s always right.”

“And you have no,” she shuddered, “ethics?”

“I give the public what it wants, if that’s what you mean.”

There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval.

Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviourism, that is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane.

True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.

To be morally upset about how other people take their sexual pleasure is surely the weirdest human quirk ever.