Quotes about Morality

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet, but they cannot live together in harmony .

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. WILLIAM HAZLITT

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. ST. AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Rochefoucauld's maxim

This means that, bad though it is and dangerous though its slipway may prove, there is a sense in which hypocrisy may be preferable to wickedness. Hypocrisy still cares enough about virtue to want to pretend to be virtuous, or at least it recognizes that the society around still prizes virtue enough to make it worth flattering.

Americans might ponder two quotations. One is the much-cited, self-congratulatory saying attributed to Tocqueville (but whose source no one has so far been able to show me): "America is great because America is good." The other is the very real saying of Samuel Johnson, attacking the similar self-congratulatory "greatness" of the English: "We continue every day to show by new proofs, that no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

Self denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.