Moralist Quotes - Page 3

• If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

  Timothy Leary

  Moving, Want, Hives

  Timothy Leary (2001). “Your Brain Is God”, p.34, Ronin Publishing

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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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• Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.

  Philip Guston

  Moving, Wind, Different

  Philip Guston, Clark Coolidge (2011). “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”, p.54, Univ of California Press

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• Man is a political animal by nature; he is a scientist by chance or choice; he is a moralist because he is a man.

  Hans Morgenthau

  Animal, Men, Choices

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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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• Rough Johnson, the great moralist.

  Lord Byron

  Morality, Rough, Johnson

  Lord Byron (2015). “Don Juan”, p.279, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The modern moralists extol ... the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.

  Julien Benda

  Modern, Defiance, Cult

  Julien Benda (2011). “The Treason of the Intellectuals”, p.146, Transaction Publishers

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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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• any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

  Sue Grafton

  Artist, Two, Mystery

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• I think to scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure, and those who refuse to be scandalized are moralists.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Thinking, Pleasure, Refuse

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• What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.

  Honore de Balzac

  People, Judging, Crime

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• Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.

  Stanislaw Lem

  War, Men, Simple

  Stanislaw Lem (1984). “His Master's Voice”, p.121, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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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• It is one thing to decry the rat race...that is the good and honorable work of moralists. It is quite another thing to quit the rat race, to drop out, to refuse to run any further--that is the work of the individualist. It is offensive because it is impolite it makes the rebuke personal the individualist calls not his or her behavior into question, but mine.

  Paul Gruchow

  Running, Race, Rats

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• I like pacifists and people who have a heavy emotional identification with deathism and war would probably call me a pacifist, but I am a non-invasivist rather than a non-violentist. That is, I believe that an invaded people have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. This includes putting ground glass or poison in the invaders' food, shooting at them from ambush, sabotage, the general strike, armed revolution, etc. It's up to the invaded to decide which of these techniques they will use. It's not up to some moralist to tell them which techniques are permissible.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  War, Believe, Mean

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Firsts, Appearance

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, p.166, Yale University Press

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• Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

  Alain Badiou

  Plato, Philosophical, Order

  "Plato, Our Dear Plato!". Magazine littéraire, no. 447, November 2005.

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• The character of Jesus has not only been the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive in its practice, and has exerted so deep an influence, that it may be truly said that the simple record of three years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Jesus, Character, Simple

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• The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Civilization, People

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Barbara L. Packer, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson (2003). “The Conduct of Life”, p.51, Harvard University Press

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• Some moralist or mythological poet
  Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
  I am satisfied with that,
  Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
  Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Swans, Mirrors

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

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• The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.

  George Orwell

  Blow, Moon, Echoes

  George Orwell (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.

  John Carroll

  Responsibility, Evil, Woe

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.64, Taylor & Francis

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• One has said that Christ excelled all other moralists in this, that He puts the padlock not upon the hand, but upon the heart. But He does not use the padlock at all, He renders such a thing unnecessary. He takes the tiger from the heart, and replaces it with the lamb.

  Edward Thomson

  Heart, Hands, Padlocks

  Edward Thomson (1872). “Evidences of Revealed Religion”, p.228

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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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• 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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