Quotes about Morality

There are a few blacks who have the courage to speak honestly about immorality within the black culture, and whites should work with them to help unite the races with truth.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.

If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning?

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.

Good masters teach good doctrine, but that taught by evil masters is wholly evil.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

The book, '12 Rules For Life,' is a very serious book. There's elements of humor in it, but I'm trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it's necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there's hell to pay if you don't do that.

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.