Moral Quotes - Page 19

• To be patriotic, hate all nations but your own; to be religious, all sects but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own.

  Lionel Strachey

  Religious, Fear, Hate

  Lionel Strachey (1912). “The world's wit and humor: an encyclopedia of the classic wit and humor of all ages and nations...”

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• [This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral and political considerations or to the facts of everyday life. [...] But more often than not, if you give the skeptic everything he wants, then he will be successful in repulsing your attacks and terrorizing your position.

  Dale Jamieson

  Philosophical, Successful, Giving

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• Characters in Hollywood movies encounter a lot of car chases. Characters in novels rarely wash their hands or do their laundry. And in the work of moral psychologists, people deliberate and reflect a lot. They deliberate, one sometimes feels, whenever they perform an action, and certainly whenever they act for good reasons.

  Nomy Arpaly

  Character, People, Car

  Nomy Arpaly (2002). “Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Moral Agency”, p.20, Oxford University Press

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• The ties of virtue ought to be closer than the ties of blood, since the good man is closer to another good man by their similarity of morals than the son is to his father by their similarity of face.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Father, Son, Men

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• The manner in which the hours of freedom are spent determines, no less than labor and war, the moral worth of a nation.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  War, Hours, Determine

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• Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue.

  Peter Boghossian

  Illness, Virtue, Cognitive

  Peter Boghossian (2013). “A Manual for Creating Atheists”, p.150, Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA)

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• I do not oppose violence simply because it is counterproductive. I oppose it because it betrays animal rights philosophy. Those who resort to such tactics really have not understood that animal rights is about the extension of moral concern to all sentient beings--humans obviously included.

  Andrew Linzey

  Philosophy, Animal, Rights

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• A judge found it constitutionally intolerable that Louisiana should interject 'religious beliefs and moral judgments into teaching.'

  William Murchison

  Christian, Religious, Teaching

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• Poverty is not an act of God. It is the result of flawed policy, and that is a moral challenge.

  Paul Simon

  Challenges, Poverty, Results

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• As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Religious, Riding, Morality

  Mahatma Gandhi (2005). “All Men Are Brothers”, p.72, A&C Black

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• [T]he central problem of government is a religious one; and anyone who assumes that he can form his political beliefs without consulting his ethics, which have their basis in religious conviction, is deceiving himself either about the true nature of government or his moral responsibility for his actions

  H. Verlan Andersen

  Religious, Responsibility, Government

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• The truth of religion comes from its symbolic rendering of man's moral experience; it proceeds intuitively and imaginatively. Its falsehood comes from its attempt to substitute itself for science and to pretend that its poetic statements are information about reality.

  Eugene Genovese

  Reality, Men, Information

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• I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society.

  Andrei Sakharov

  Savages, Foundation, Death Penalty

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• What Europe owes to the Jews? - Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing of the nature both of the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness - and consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring, and exquisite element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in the aftersheen of which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, now glows - perhaps glows out.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Europe, Sky, Style

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2017). “Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Hellenism & Pessimism – 3 Unbeatable Philosophy Books in One Volume: The Birth of Tragedy”, p.591, e-artnow

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• It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Perspective, Political

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Ironic, Compass

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

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• It always sounds kind of trivial, but when I was a kid I was always so impressed by how serious the comic books were. I always liked how they were half way between literature and the cinema. I liked the visuals and I liked the simplicity of a certain type of moral dilemma.

  Walter Hill

  Book, Kids, Simplicity

  Source: collider.com

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• It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones, but I think it is already clear that John Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.

  Allen W. Wood

  Thinking, Important, Eras

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For the utilitarian, there is a fact of the matter about the good (the general happiness, or whatever conception of the good the utilitarian adopts) and about which actions or moral rules would contribute to maximizing the good. For the rational intuitionist, there are truths about which actions should be done and not done.

  Allen W. Wood

  Done, Maximizing, Matter

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Our procedures of deliberation are not ways of finding out independent moral truths but instead ways of "constructing" these truths, in the process of deciding what to do.

  Allen W. Wood

  Independent, Deciding What To Do, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.

  Allen W. Wood

  Tasks, Matter, Firsts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Kantian ethical theory distinguishes three levels: First, that of a fundamental principle (the categorical imperative, formulated in three main ways in Kant's Groundwork); second, a set of duties, not deduced from but derived from this principle, by way of its interpretation or specification, its application to the general conditions of human life - which Kant does in the Doctrine of virtue, the second main part of the Metaphysics of Morals; and then finally an act of judgment, through which these duties are applied to particular cases.

  Allen W. Wood

  Principles, Doe, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Kant's description of most ethical duties reads more like a description of moral virtues and vices. Once we see this, we see that Kantian ethics is indeed a kind of virtue ethics, and that it does not "divide the heart from the head" (to anticipate one of your later questions) but instead recognizes the deep truth that reason and emotion are not opposites.

  Allen W. Wood

  Heart, Reason And Emotion, Opposites

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Kant says that we may regard ourselves as legislator of the moral law, and consider ourselves as its author, but not that we are legislators or authors of the law.

  Allen W. Wood

  Law, May, Regard

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There is no author or legislator of the moral law. It is simply valid in itself in the nature or essence of things. We become autonomous only when we obey it, because then our will aligns itself with the objectively valid law, and our choice follows the same law as that we give ourselves. We can think of rational faculty (or the idea - the pure rational concept, not exhibitable in experience) as the legislator or author of the law because reason recognizes an objective standard, and to that extent is already aligned with objective moral truth.

  Allen W. Wood

  Thinking, Law, Essence

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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