“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”
Variant: The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer 161
German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi 1906–1945Related quotes

“The test of the moral quality of a civilization is its treatment of the weak and powerless.”
United States ex rel. Caminito v. Murphy, 222 F.2d 698, 706 (1955).

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), as quoted in Milan Kundera (2003) by Harold Bloom, [//books.google.it/books?id=SXDojRJFMPIC&pg=PA91 p. 91]
Context: True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 214.