Quotes about Morality

What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics--not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction ethics, the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.

Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for beeing good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world.

There was no action she could take against the men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them—nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer?

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge.

In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims.

Integrity does not consist of loyalty to ones subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles

Every political system is based on some code of ethics.

The theoretical purpose of that grotesque absurdity is to establish a moral inversion: to make the initiation of force moral, and resistance to force immoral—and thus to obliterate the right of self-defense. The immediate practical purpose is to foster the activities of the lowest political breed: the provocateurs, who commit acts of force and place the blame on their victims.

We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.

Be conscious of God and speak always the truth

And then there was the unsettling fact that, despite whatever my mother might claim, the bullies, cheats, and self-promoters seemed to be doing quite well, while those she considered good and decent people seemed to get screwed an awful lot.