Moralist Quotes - Page 2

• Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

  Russell Kirk

  Inspirational, Change, Men

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.274, Regnery Publishing

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• If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

  Russell Kirk

  Order, Soul, Want

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• If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Tasks, Addresses

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

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• It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Powerful, Self, Deception

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2011). “The Will to Power”, p.340, Vintage

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• The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.

  Robert Payne

  Found, Good Moral

  Robert Payne (1975). “The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America”, Praeger Publishers

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• For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy

  Bertrand Russell

  Years, Two, Morality

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.120, Routledge

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• Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?

  Quentin Crisp

  Block, Lying, People

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.

  Clarence Day

  Reality, Ethics, Morality

  CLARENCE DAY (1948). “THE BEST”

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• Conscience is a great moralist inside us with a stick in its hand. It is a whip of virtue which oppresses us unmercifully when we do wrong.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Hands, Sticks, Virtue

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• Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.

  John Carroll

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.31, Taylor & Francis

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• Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Fire, Inspire, Soul

  'La Nouvelle Hèloise' (1761, ed. M. Launay, 1967) pt. 2, letter 11

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• In spite of what moralists say, the, animals are scarcely less wicked or less unhappy than we are ourselves. The arrogance of the strong, the servility of the weak, low rapacity, ephemeral pleasure purchased by great effort, death preceded by long suffering, all belong to the animals as they do to men.

  Georges Cuvier

  Death, Strong, Science

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• There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Passion, Ambition, Character

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• A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.

  Samuel Johnson

  Scotland, Doe, Sturdy

  'A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland' (1775) 'Ostig in Sky'

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• It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Civilization, Mind, Example

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1908). “Robert Louis Stevenson”

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• Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists.

  Stephen R. L. Clark

  Flesh, Serious, Vegetarian

  "The Moral Status of Animals". Book by Stephen R. L. Clark, 1977.

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• Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.

  Mason Cooley

  Success, Silent, Hollowness

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• I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists" and politicians, plutocrats, bankers, arms dealers, and experts and technocrats were not solely defining the moral norms as well as the political lives of our societies. We do have some writers claiming to be public moralists, but, as I said, they have actually been more jingoistic than even the henchmen of Bush and Blair.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Political, Bankers, Experts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.

  Charles Lamb

  Men, Littles, Sometimes

  Charles Lamb (1855). “Works, with a Sketch of His Life and Final Memorials”, p.368

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• We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.

  Samuel Johnson

  Intellectual, Perception, Matter

  'The Lives of the English Poets' (1779-81) 'Milton'

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• The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  History, Wickedness, Levels

  Theodore Roosevelt (2006). “History as Literature and Other Essays”, p.19, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I support, defend, and admire prostitutes, gay or straight. They do important and necessary work, whether moralists of the Left and Right like it or not. Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force. Simply in the Western world, pagan sexuality has survived 2000 years of Judaeo-Christian persecution and is hardly going to be defeated by a few feminists whacking at it with their brooms.

  Camille Paglia

  Christian, Sex, Gay

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• I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralisation, degradation, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.

  Almeida Garrett

  Ignorance, Men, Order

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• We have allowed the sexual debate to be defined by women, and that's not right. Men must speak, and speak in their own voices, not voices coerced by feminist moralists.

  Camille

  Men, Voice, Feminist

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• We can safely say, therefore, that whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns-one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity-where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one.

  Joseph Campbell

  Two, May, Definitions

  Joseph Campbell (2011). “Myths to Live By”, p.89, Joseph Campbell Foundation

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