Quotes about Ethics

The virtue of its Citizens is the only Support of a Republican government.

Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.

The difference between a good man and a bad man is the choice of cause.

If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he's making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists.

For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

How would you explain the fact that atheists just know that harming an innocent human being is wrong, and can live good lives, without believing that God is the ultimate source of values and duties? To repeat: Belief in God is not necessary for objective morality; God is.

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: "If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.

The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist.

Dostoyevsky said, "All things are permitted." But man cannot live this way. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

A legacy of true value is a legacy made of more than money. It's a legacy conceived in wisdom, nurtured by principle, and sustained by character.