Moralist Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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 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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• To amend mankind, moralists should show them man, not as he is, but as he ought to be.

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Men, Should, Mankind

  Marguerite Countess of Blessington, Marguerite GARDINER (Countess of Blessington.) (1839). “Desultory Thoughts and Reflections”, p.110

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• Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Fashion, Age, Generations

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• When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Writing, Character, Mean

  "Charles Dickens: A Critical Study". Book by G. K. Chesterton, 1906.

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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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• All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.

  Gene Wolfe

  Beautiful, Art, Children

  Gene Wolfe (2009). “The very best of Gene Wolfe: a definitive retrospective of his finest short fiction”

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• Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists.

  David Hume

  War, Loss, Luxury

  David Hume (1751). “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals”, p.30

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• That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is most often unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.

  Adam Smith

  Respect, Greatness, Age

  Adam Smith (1869). “Essays On, I. Moral Sentiments: II. Astronomical Inquiries; III. Formation of Languages; IV. History of Ancient Physics; V. Ancient Logic and Metaphysicis; VI. The Imitative Arts; VII. Music, Dancing, Poetry; VIII. The External Senses; IX. English and Italian Verses”, p.57

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• If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, it were in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts with which all moralists abound.

  David Hume

  Pain, Passion, Would Be

  David Hume (2016). “A Treatise of Human Nature: Revision of Great Book”, p.425, VM eBooks

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• A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion; he may be learning not to live but to reason... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed.

  Samuel Johnson

  Mind, Use, May

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1823). “The Works of Samuel Johnson: LL.D. A New Edition in Twelve Volumes. With an Essay on His Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.102

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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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• You pick up very well-known books on Lincoln [and] you will find almost no reference to his long-term belief in colonization. Why? Because it doesn't fit the image of the Great Emancipator. It doesn't fit the retrospective view we want to have of Lincoln as the man who was the moralist in politics, who came into office committed to ending slavery and waited to sign this document.

  Eric Foner

  Book, Men, Views

  "Eric Foner on the Perennial Relevance of Abraham Lincoln". Interview with Aaron Leonard, historynewsnetwork.org. October 4, 2010.

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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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• Rough Johnson, the great moralist.

  Lord Byron

  Morality, Rough, Johnson

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

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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