Quotes on Morality

In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.

Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.

If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.

To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

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.

According to Gandhi, the seven sins are wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle. Well, Hubert Humphrey may have sinned in the eyes of God, as we all do, but according to those definitions of Gandhi's, it was Hubert Humphrey without sin.

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.

Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

We must have research for peace ... It would embrace the outstanding problems of morality. The time has come for man's intellect, his scientific method, to win over the immoral brutality and irrationality of war and militarism ... Now we are forced to eliminate from the world forever this vestige of prehistoric barbarism, this curse to the human race.

"I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world."

History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.

The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children.