When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. ~Martin Luther King Jr.
Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are "good" (or right) and those that are "bad" (or wrong).
Wisdom is purified by morality, and morality is purified by wisdom: where one is, the other is, the moral man has wisdom and the wise man has morality, and the combination of morality of wisdom is called the highest thing in the world. ~Gautama Buddha
Moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.
It is sayd there be a raunge of mountaynes in the Easte, on one syde of the which certayn conducts are immorall, yet on the other syde they are holden in good esteeme; wherebye the mountayneer is much conveenyenced, for it is given to him to goe downe eyther way and act as it shall suite his moode, withouten offence. —Gooke's Meditations
Immoral, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man's notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from, and nowise dependent on, their consequences—then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.
Ambrose Bierce,The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.
Wisdom is purified by morality, and morality is purified by wisdom: where one is, the other is, the moral man has wisdom and the wise man has morality, and the combination of morality of wisdom is called the highest thing in the world.
Gautama Buddha,Digha Nikaya, verse 22, as translated by M. Walshe,Thus Have I Heard: The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Boston, MA, 1987), p. 131
"Tut, tut, child," said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."
There are two principles of established acceptance in morals; first, that self-interest is the mainspring of all of our actions, and secondly, that utility is the test of their value.
We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic — a moral code independent of religion — strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities?
Cowardice, caressed by Christianity, creates morality.
Bruno Filippi,The Rebel’s Dark Laughter: The Writings of Bruno Filippi (1918)[1]
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
Emma Goldman, "Victims of Morality", inMother Earth, vol. 8, no. 1 (March 1913)[2]
Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
Plausible moral theory must have at its center a concern for the lives and well-being of persons...It is presumptively wrong to do violence to innocent persons...a necessary condition of the justifiable pursuit of anany objectives in war byany means whatsoever...is that one be justified in engaging in such killing and violence in the first place.
Robert L. Holmes,On War and Morality (1989), Ch. 1: p. 24, p. 44, p. 180
There is a principle, supposed to prevail among many, which is utterly incompatible with all virtue or moral sentiment; and as it can proceed from nothing but the most depraved disposition, so in its turn it tends still further to encourage that depravity. This principle is, that all benevolence is mere hypocrisy, friendship a cheat, public spirit a farce, fidelity a snare to procure trust and confidence; and that while all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises, in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations.
David Hume,An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), appendix 2
The main objection to absolute morality is that even if there were absolute moral standards we should have no way of knowing whether we had found them.
When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom.
Though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it.
Dionysus used to laugh at professors who did research into the bad qualities of Ulysses yet knew nothing of their own; at musicians whose flutes were harmonious but not their morals; at orators whose studies led to talking about justice, not to being just.
Montaigne,Essays, bk. 1, ch. 25, as translated by M. Screech (Penguin Classics, 1991), p. 156
Friedrich Nietzsche,Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Beyond Good and Evil] (1886), ch. 9, no. 260
All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,Do What Thou Wilt; because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour.
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell,Why I Am Not a Christian (1927); this has often been misquoted as "The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
Morality has always had a difficult time of it; utility and legality even begrudge the fact of its existence.
Friedrich Schlegel, as translated by P. Firchow,Philosophical Fragments (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), "Athenaeum Fragments", § 373
People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality.
Friedrich Schlegel, as translated by P. Firchow,Philosophical Fragments, § 414
We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You've got to learn to behave like a duchess.
If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
Es stände besser um die Welt, wenn die Mühe, die man sich gibt, die subtilsten Moralgesetze auszuklügeln, zur Ausübung der einfachsten angewendet würde.
The world would be in better shape if people would take the same pains in the practice of the simplest moral laws as they exert in intellectualizing over the most subtle moral questions.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach,Aphorismen (Berlin, 1880; 4th ed. 1895), as translated by D. Scrase and W. Mieder,Aphorisms (Riverside, CA, 1994), p. 30
You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts; for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.
Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.
Arthur J. Balfour,Foundations of Belief.
No mere man since the Fall, is able in this life perfectly to keep the Commandments.
For what end shall we be connected with men, of whom this is the character and conduct?… Is it, that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured; speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, and the lothing of God and man?
Timothy Dwight,The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis (1798), p. 20–21. Dwight, president of Yale, preached this sermon on July 4, 1798, at New Haven, Connecticut. In 1798, much of the anti-French feeling was directed at the Jeffersonians, who were the champions in America of the French Revolution. In the congressional elections that year, the Jeffersonians lost heavily as the Federalists won control of both the House and the Senate. In this sermon, Dwight warned that a victory for the Jeffersonians meant lustful moral depravity. Saul K. Padover,Jefferson (1942), p. 251–52
Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
John F. Kennedy, remarks in Bonn, West Germany, at the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps, June 24, 1963.The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 503. This remark may have been inspired by the passage from Dante Alighieri's La Comedia Divina, trans. Geoffrey L. Bickersteth, "Inferno", canto 3, lines 35–42 (1972):
by those disbodied wretches who were loth when living, to be either blamed or praised. … … … … … … Fear to lose beauty caused the heavens to expel these caitiffs; nor, lest to the damned they then gave cause to boast, receives them the deep hell.
A more modern-sounding translation: "They are mixed with that repulsive choir of angels … undecided in neutrality. Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out, but even Hell itself would not receive them for fear the wicked there might glory over them".—Dante's Inferno, trans. Mark Musa, p. 21 (1971)
I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.
Robert F. Kennedy, "Day of Affirmation", address delivered at the University of Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966.Congressional Record, June 6, 1966, vol. 112, p. 12430
Even in war moral power is to physical as three parts out of four.
Attributed toNapoleon I; reported in Maturin M. Ballou,Treasury of Thought (1899), p. 407. Reported as unverified inRespectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989). A handwritten note in Congressional Research Service files says that the War Department Library had searched many times without success for a different version: "Morale is to material as is the ratio of three to one".
Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Albert Schweitzer, "Civilization and Ethics", Preface,The Philosophy of Civilization, trans. C. T. Campion, part 2 (1949, reissued 1981), p. 79.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.
