Quotes on Morality

To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.

If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour.

Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.

The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.

A man may not transgress the bounds of major morals, but may make errors in minor morals.

Without "ethical culture", there is no salvation for humanity.

Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

Morality, when formal, devours.

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.