Quotes about Morality

If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.

The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.

Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

It has not only detested beauty when produced at the price of justice; it has rejected the ritual when performed by the morally corrupted. Even religion itself, worship, was not considered to be an absolute. "Your prayers are an abomination," said Isaiah to the exploiters of the poor. Stay away from the synagogue, wrote the Gaon of Wilna to his household, if you cannot abstain from envy and gossiping about the dresses of your fellow attendants.

Ye shall kindle no fire—not even the fire of righteous indignation.

The laws of the Torah ask of each generation to fulfill what is within its power to fulfill. Some of its laws (for example Exodus 21:2 ff),14 do not represent ideals but compromises, realistic attempts to refine the moral condition of ancient man.

Right living is a way to right thinking.

Above all it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man's problem is God, God's problem is man.

One should always do the good, even though it is not done for its own sake.

To the Bible the idea of the good is penultimate; it cannot exist without the holy. The holy is the essence, the good is its expression.