“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!”

The Discover Interview: Lisa Randall (July 2006)

"The Knock at the Stage Door" in Reader's Digest (December 1933); also in A Dictionary of Catch Phrases : British and American, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (1986) http://books.google.com.br/books?id=Nm3jbg0JalMC&pg=PA24&dq=All+the+things+I+really+like+to+do+are+either+illegal,+immoral,+or+fattening by Eric Partridge and Paul Beale, ISBN 041505916X, ISBN 9780415059169 .

Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

26 June 1971
The Duty of Delight (2011)
Context: For some weeks now my problem is this: What to do about the open immorality (and of course I mean sexual morality) in our midst. It is like the last times--there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.... We have one young [prostitute], drunken, promiscuous, pretty as a picture, college educated, mischievous, able to talk her way out of any situation--so far. She comes to us when she is drunk and beaten and hungry and cold and when she is taken in, she is liable to crawl into the bed of any man on the place. We do not know how many she has slept with on the farm. What to do? What to do?

Dr. Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852), in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, vol. 2, London: John W. Parker and son, 1859, p. 485 https://books.google.it/books?id=w-I3AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA485

Testaments Betrayed (1995), p. 7
Context: Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.

Source: 11/22/63

Interview in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Autumn Press, 1979), p. 82.