Quotes about morale (3983 quotes, page 39)

“I had no doubts as to the correctness of my own beliefs, that human nature could be altered, that man could be forced to evolve morally.”

Roger Zelazny book Today We Choose Faces

Part 2, Chapter 9 (p. 147)
Today We Choose Faces (1973)

Nature

“Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence a lot of mankind.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

From a letter to Hermann Huth, Vice-President of the German Vegetarian Federation, 27 December 1930. Supposedly published in German magazine Vegetarische Warte, which existed from 1882 to 1935. Einstein Archive 46-756. Quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2011), [//books.google.it/books?id=G_iziBAPXtEC&pg=PA453 p. 453]. ISBN 978-0-691-13817-6
1930s

“Moral your artistic proclivities are not, nor fitting for a physician, though I won’t deny the skill in them. They are, I will say it, unnatural.”

China Miéville book The Design

The Design (p. 374)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Benevolence is the foundation of Justice, since we are forbidden to injure those we are bound to assist. A prophet may reveal the secrets of Heaven and futurity, but in his moral precepts he can only repeat the lessons of our own hearts.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

EGPaIV" Edward Gibbon, [1788], Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/gibbon/05/daf05010.htm, Vol. 5, Chapter L: Description Of Arabia And Its Inhabitants. Part IV.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)

Future , Secret , Justice , Heart

“In politics there is no morality anyway. The nature of the game precludes it. A politician's career depends upon the fickle wind of public opinion. He is forced to trim his conscience to catch every shift of the breeze.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Gil Langton in Ch. 3, p. 38
The Ringmaster (1991)

Game , Dependency , Nature

“The moral choices that Trump poses to anyone with a conscience or love of country are only made more clear by the ludicrous irony of his own story.”

Richard Wolffe (1968) American journalist

Let's drop the euphemisms: Donald Trump is a racist president (2018)

Love , Making love , Country

“Most of the morals that people strongly believe in are just fads that come and go with the passing of time.”

Nathan Larson (politician) (1980–2022) American perennial candidate, pedophile and white supremacist.

[Independent Nathan Larson seeks 31st District seat, 6 November 2017, Fauquier Now, http://www.fauquiernow.com/index.php/fauquier_news/article/fauquier-independent-nathan-larson-seeks-31st-district-seat-2017]

Time , People

“[H]ere we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural."”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what (s)he was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath?

" Reprogramming Predators https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/reprogramming-predators.html", BLTC Research, 2009

Nature

“[T]o require that a so-called layman should not use his own reason in religious matters, particularly since religion is to be appreciated as moral, but instead follow the appointed clergyman and thus someone else's reason, is an unjust demand because as to morals every man must account for all his doings. The clergyman will not and even cannot assume such a responsibility.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 94-95
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Religion

“Habit... makes the endurance of evil easy (which, under the name of patience, is falsely honored as a virtue), because sensations of the same type, when continued without alteration for a long time, draw our attention away from the senses so that we are scarcely conscious of them at all. On the other hand, habit also makes the consciousness and the remembrance of good that has been received more difficult, which then gradually leads to ingratitude (a real vice). [...] Acquired habit deprives good actions of their moral value because it undermines mental freedom and, moreover, it leads to thoughtless repetitions of the same acts (monotony), and thus becomes ridiculous.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 34-35
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Drawing , Time , Freedom , Falseness

“What vexations there are in the external customs which are thought to belong to religion, but which in reality are related to ecclesiastical form! The merits of piety have been set up in such away that the ritual is of no use at all except for the simple submission of the believers to ceremonies and observances, expiations and mortifications (the more the better). But such compulsory services, which are mechanically easy (because no vicious inclination is thus sacrificed), must be found morally very difficult and burdensome to the rational man. When, therefore, the great moral teacher said, 'My commandments are not difficult,' he did not mean that they require only limited exercise of strength in order to be fulfilled. As a matter of fact, as commandments which require pure dispositions of the heart, they are the hardest that can be given. Yet, for a rational man, they are nevertheless infinitely easier to keep than the commandments involving activity which accomplishes nothing... [since] the mechanically easy feels like lifting hundredweights to the rational man when he sees that all the energy spent is wasted.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View https://books.google.com/books?id=TbkVBMKz418C. Translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 9780809320608. Page 33.
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Religion , Heart , Teachers , Reality

“We may think as we like theoretically, about man’s freedom of action, we must practically start from it as the foundation of the moral law, for only under this condition is social morality possible.”

Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) German politician

Source: "Evolutionary Socialism" (1899) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm, Chapter III, The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy

Thinking , Law , Freedom

“[I]f suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" The Meat Eaters http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/", The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2010

Bad luck , Suffering , Animals , Relation ships

“Fourth is the argument from moral praise and blame:
# According to Dr. Rosenberg, if naturalism is true then I am not morally praiseworthy or blameworthy for any of my actions because, as I said, on his view objective moral values and duties do not exist.
# But, I am morally praiseworthy and blameworthy for at least some of my actions. If you think that you have ever done something truly wrong or truly good then you should conclude:
# Therefore, naturalism is not true.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Thinking , Nature

“Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 219-220
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Nature , Behavior , Women , Men

“My dislike of the Jews is that which our forefathers had of them: I dislike them as insolent ruffians, who mock the religion and morality of Christians; I dislike them as people that never work, and form a body of wretches who live by trick; I dislike them as usurers, and the great agents of those systems of usury by which so many nations have so severely suffered; and this nation, above all others; in France they were the rapacious farmers of the taxes; in Poland, in Germany, in Hungary; every where, where they have been allowed to practise their arts of plunder, they have produced ruin to the people, and very frequently to the state.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (5 June 1830), p. 730
1830s

Suffering , Religion , People , Art

“1. We are morally obligated to alleviate unjustified animal suffering that it is in our power to prevent without occasioning as much or more unjustified suffering.
2. Innocent animals suffer when they are preyed upon by other animals.
3. Therefore, we are morally obligated to prevent predation whenever we can do so without occasioning as much or more unjustified suffering than the predation would create, and we are also morally obligated to attempt to expand the number of such cases.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

"Saving the Rabbit from the Fox", p. 247
Morals, Reason, and Animals (1987)

Animals , Suffering

“Aristotle thought that men were naturally superior to women and Greeks naturally superior to other races; Victorians thought white men had to shoulder the burden of being superior to savages; and Nazis thought Aryans were a master race. We have come to reject these and many other supposedly natural hierarchies; the history of what we consider moral progress can be viewed as, in large part, the replacement of hierarchical worldviews with a presumption in favor of forms of egalitarianism. This substitution places the burden of proof on those who would deny equal consideration to the interests of all concerned, rather than on those who seek such consideration. Consequently, some reason is needed to justify the fairness of maintaining a hierarchical worldview when we are dealing with animals.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

Source: Morals, Reason, and Animals (1987), p. 107

History , Nature , Women , Animals

“Baldner contends that is "arrogant" and "paternalistic" morally to condemn something as definitive of the natural order as predation. However, it is in the nature of morality to devise ideals of a better world and to work toward realizing them. This entails judging this world to be less than ideal and working to change it. One could restrict moral evaluations to the products of human activity, but that would be arbitrary: what makes suffering (prima facie) morally bad is not that it is the result of human activity but that it is suffering. Our commitment to making the world a morally better place impels us to make moral evaluations of the natural order. There need be nothing either arrogant or paternalistic in making and acting on such evaluations, provided we recognize the very limited nature of our understanding and our power to make improvements.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

Steve Sapontzis, " Dicussion: Environmental Ethics and the Locus of Value https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2060&context=bts", Between the Species (Winter 1990), p. 9

Understanding , Bad luck , Suffering , Nature

“On the other hand, refusing to accept and affirm, avoidable suffering, unfair distributions of goods, uninhibited aggression, and so forth, are refusals which have long been and continue to be part of everyday morality. As such, they are a well-established part of life as it is. Animal liberation extends such concerns, which have traditionally been focused on the human world and on human life, to include equal consideration for animals. In this way, animal liberation is simply carrying on the business of everyday moral practice. Therefore, it does not loathe or deny life as it is. Rather, unlike Callicott's proposed retreat to the wilderness, animal liberation is participating in life and, hopefully, in its continuing moral evolution.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

Steve Sapontzis, " Article Review of Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1244&context=ethicsandanimals", Ethics and Animals, Vol. 5, Iss. 4 (1984), p. 120

Business , Suffering , Animals , World

“When our interests or the interests of those we care for will be hurt, we do not recognize a moral obligation to "let nature take its course," but when we do not want to be bothered with an obligation, "that's just the way the world works" provides a handy excuse.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

Steve Sapontzis, " Predation https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1220&context=ethicsandanimals", Ethics and Animals, Vol. 5, Iss. 2, Art. 4 (1984), p. 29

Way , Hurt , World , Nature

“Give any man the power of a god, and you better hope he's got the wisdom and morals of a god to match. There's nothing feeble about my moral line. I value life. That is why I fight to protect it. I mourn every man I lose and every sacrifice I make. One life or a billion, they're all lives.”

Dan Abnett (1965) British comic book writer, novelist

Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt:
Warhammer 40,000 Works, Gaunt's Ghosts (novel series), First & Only

God , Hope , Fight , Life

“Going to Bits. This phrase me to day and is indeed the one I have been looking for; not tragic, not mortal disintegration; only a central weakness which prevents me from concentrating or settling down I have so wanted to write and write ahead. The phrase "obligatory creation" has haunted me. I have so wanted to get out of my morning bath promptly: have decided to do so beforehand, and have then lain in it as usual and watched myself not getting out. It looks as if there is a physical as well as a moral break in the orders I send out. I have plenty of interesting thoughts but keep losing them like the post cards I have written, or like my cap. I can't clear anything up yet interrupt a 'good read' in order to clear up. I hope tomorrow to copy out a piece of someone else's prose: it is the best device known to me for taking one out of inself, Plunge into anothers minutiae.'”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

31-1-61

p. 224
Commonplace Book (1985)

Hope , Reading

“When we create an economic system based on co-operation and sharing rather than on competition and market forces, we will create a more moral economic structure. When the stock exchanges collapse, humanity will be brought face to face with its illusions about the nature of reality.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997)

Reality , Nature

“Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called the 'Golden Rule' from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwin himself did not quite perceive it. While man was deemed to be a creation apart from all other creations, a secondary or tertiary morality was considered good enough to practise towards the 'inferior' races; but no person who reasons nowadays can escape the trying conclusion that this is not maintainable. And though we may not at present see how the principle of equal justice all round is to be carried out in it entirety, I recognize that the League is grappling with the question.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Letter to the Humanitarian League (1910)

Justice , Question , Personality , People

“Spirituality is the essential nature of our being, simply needing demonstration in outer forms. Whatever we can conceive of as human activity can be, in fact must be, spiritual. True morality is not to do with a code of values which humanity evolves to suit a certain society or a certain religious belief, but something which is intrinsic in our spirituality.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997)

Nature

“A country that can afford a $738 billion defense budget but will not ensure its school children a more healthy diet is a country whose moral values are spiraling down and whose future health care costs will be spiraling up.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Twitter https://twitter.com/marwilliamson (18 Jan 20)
Williamson's quotes in social media

School , Country , Future , Children

“The ground on which we’ll unite as Americans is the higher ground of moral repair. Not Left or Right, or even Democrats or Republicans. We’ll unite as Americans, having come to realize that aligning public policy with the goodness in our hearts is our best and only path forward.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Twitter https://twitter.com/marwilliamson (1 Oct 2019)
Williamson's quotes in social media

Heart

“The 1918 flu almost certainly didn’t originate in Spain. One popular theory for how it acquired the “Spanish” name posits that Spain was the only country where you could read about the disease. That’s because Spain remained neutral during World War I, and therefore its newspapers weren’t censoring any information deemed harmful to national morale. The disease was also rampaging through other countries, including France, Germany, Britain, and the United States, but those governments suppressed or downplayed reports on the extent of the damage. Accurate and timely information is vital to combating a pandemic, but still, some countries’ first impulses are to cover up the spread of the disease.”

Joshua Keating American journalist

Strongman Medicine: Suspicious Numbers and Brutal Quarantines (April 02, 2020)

Time , Reading , Country , War

“Is that what free will is: the right to be flogged to moral action by a deity who could make the world a paradise merely by speaking His desire?”

Nick Harkaway (1972) British writer

wooden egg lying
Gnomon (2017)

World , Making love

“The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

The Stereotype
The Female Eunuch (1970)

Sex , Women , Men

“Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Source http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1995/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19951008_baltimore.html Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore, Sunday, 8 October 1995
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220416100400/https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1995/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19951008_baltimore.html Archived] from [https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1995/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19951008_baltimore.html the original

Truth , Making love , Freedom

“Public servants are not entitled to abuse their power to do anything illegal.
Writers are not supposed to misuse their flair to elicit evil thoughts.
Professionals are never easy to cultivate.
Immoral is one when he applies his knowledge to the breachment of morality and law.”

Deng Feng-Zhou (1949) Chinese poet, Local history writer, Taoist Neidan academics and Environmentalist.

(zh-TW) 持槍作盜進行侵，利筆文章誨殺淫。
技藝人才培不易，植因造業孽緣深。

"Professional morality" (專業道德)

Source: Deng Feng-Zhou, "Deng Feng-Zhou Classical Chinese Poetry Anthology". Volume 6, Tainan, 2018: 84.

Knowledge , Law , Evil

“The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. I'm not so sure we all believe that.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

Universe , Reality , Law

“There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can’t find it.”

Arthur C. Clarke book What Goes Up

Source: 2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001), What Goes Up, p. 529

Life

“[I]t will not do to act as if the moral question was not the supreme question in public life, and, in a sense, the vera causa of party conflict.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Letter to William Ewart Gladstone (21 November 1891), quoted in J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (eds.), Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, Vol. I (1917), p. 257
1890s

Sense , Life , Question

“Let’s keep in mind not just those beings who won the metaphysical lottery by being born as Homo sapiens, but also those who lie furthest outside our moral circle. They need us the most.”

Jacy Reese (1992) American social scientist

[Our treatment of animals is stalling human progress, February 19, 2018, Quartz, https://qz.com/1209936/our-treatment-of-animals-is-stalling-human-progress/]

Lie

“Many years from now, our descendants will look back on the use of animals for food—particularly the intense animal suffering in factory farms—as a moral atrocity.”

Jacy Reese (1992) American social scientist

[Why It's Time to End Factory Farming, October 20, 2018, Quillette, https://quillette.com/2018/10/20/why-its-time-to-end-factory-farming/]

Animals , Suffering , Food

“...man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him — that he is brother to dragons.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.

“On the Underside of the Stone”, p. 177
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Animals

“Revolutionary morality consists, in whatever circumstances, in resolutely struggling against all enemies, maintaining one's vigilance, standing ready to fight, and refusing to submit, to bow one's head. Only by so doing can we defeat the enemy, and fulfill our revolutionary tasks.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

"On Revolutionary Morality" (1958)
1950's, On Revolutionary Morality (1958)

Fight

“I am a citizen of Great Britain, therefore I have a legal and moral obligation to live like other Britons and raise my children as British citizens, who are free to practise any religion they like.”

Anwar Shaikh (1928–2006) British Pakistani writer

Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Religion , Children

“Let us rise in the moral power of womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy, and insulted justice, and eternal truth, and mighty love and holy freedom.”

Maria Weston Chapman (1806–1885) American abolitionist

From [Boston Female Anti-slavery Society, Annual Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, https://books.google.com/books?id=W5I5AQAAMAAJ, 1836, The Society, 30], as quoted in [Dell, Diana, Memorable Quotations: American Women Writers of the Past, https://books.google.com/books?id=eM3IWooc_zIC, December 2000, iUniverse, 978-0-595-16230-7, 73]

Justice , Freedom , Truth , Love

“The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet (1807–1886) colonial administrator and historian

Charles Trevelyan, head of administration for famine relief during the Great Irish famine In: McCourt, John (19 March 2015). "Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland". OUP Oxford.

Selfishness , God , People , Evil

“If you attend a study session, only behave like a man wishing to expand his knowledge and seeking a higher reward from God. Do not act like a man content with what he holds, who is waiting for a weakness (from someone) to criticize (it or him), or an oddity to raise. This will be acting like vile people who have never mastered science.’ ‘If you attend with good intentions you will obtain the best results. Otherwise just stay at home, awarding yourself rest, a good morality, and a salutary outcome in front of God.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibid, 114

Home , God , Study , Waiting

“I have seen men who had studied the sciences, who knew the messages of the Prophets, the recommendations of the wise, and yet who surpassed the most evil men in their worse deeds, and their depravation. This is very frequent, and so I have understood that these two moral attitudes were favours granted or denied by the Most High.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibid, 24

Science , Study , Evil , Men

“Whosoever wishes for happiness in the other life, wisdom in this world, equity in their deeds, having all moral qualities, the practice of all virtues, ought to follow in his deeds the example of Mohammed (PBUH) the Messenger of God.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibid. 23

God , Happiness , World , Life

“There are information asymmetries in this story. Health insurance is limping along. It's limited in scope, and then you other consequences. Insurance companies have high premiums to protect themselves. The ones who come to the insurance company are sicker and the people have to pay more. You have adverse selection. You have moral hazard. And the doctor does what's on the safe side -- defensive medicine -- without regard to cost. These are fundamental conditions that make health insurance difficult. You have some things that help. Some doctors understand that they shouldn't abuse the system. But you still see problems in the way doctors behave towards patients. They goof off. Sometimes it's too much work. Some things are difficult and risky to diagnose.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

quoted in Conor Clarke, An Interview with Kenneth Arrow, Part Two https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/07/an-interview-with-kenneth-arrow-part-two/22279/ (2009)
New millennium

Understanding , Help , Health , People

“I have been impressed time and again by the schizophrenic character of many businessmen. They are capable of being extremely far‐sighted and clear‐headed in matters that are internal to their businesses. They are incredibly short sighted and muddle‐headed in mat ters [sic!] that are outside their businesses but affect the possible survival of business in general. This short sightedness is strikingly exemplified in the calls from many businessmen for wage and price guidelines or controls or incomes policies. There is nothing that could do more in a brief period to destroy a market system and replace it by a centrally controlled system than effective governmental control of prices and wages. The short‐sightedness is also exemplified in speeches by business men on social responsibility. This may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the ptirsuit [sic!] of profits is wicked and im moral [sic!] and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, business men seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 1970)

Time , Business , Help , Suicide

“Other countries have obtained deliverances equally signal and complete, but in no country has that deliverance been obtained with such perfect peace; so entirely within the bounds of the Constitution; with all the forms of law observed; the government of the country proceeding in its regular course; every man going forth unto his labour until the evening. France boasts of her three days of July, when her people rose, when barricades fenced the streets, and the entire population of the capital in arms successfully vindicated their liberties. They boast, and justly, of those three days of July; but I will boast of our ten days of May. We, too, fought a battle, but it was with moral arms. We, too, placed an impassable barrier between ourselves and military tyranny; but we fenced ourselves only with moral barricades. Not one crime committed, not one acre confiscated, not one life lost, not one instance of outrage or attack on the authorities or the laws. Our victory has not left a single family in mourning. Not a tear, not a drop of blood, has sullied the pacific and blameless triumph of a great people.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Speech to his committee at Leeds after the Reform Bill had received the Royal assent (1832), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume I (1876), pp. 283–284
1830s

Family , Peace , Law , Country

“[I]f it is the moral right we are to look at, I say, that on every principle of moral obligation, I hold that the Jew has a right to political power.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Speech in the House of Commons (5 April 1830) https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1830/apr/05/the-jews#column_1313 in favour of Robert Grant's Jewish Disabilities Bill
1830s

“Oh please. No ethic lectures from you, you cheap carny hustler... [Y]ou since you sold your moral compass for dimes long ago.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Mike Murphy, Twitter post https://twitter.com/murphymike/status/1119384870071857152 (19 April 2019)

“Preservation, renewal, and reform of the Union was my main political and, if you will, moral task in my position as president of the USSR. I consider it my greatest sorrow and misfortune that I did not succeed in preserving the country as a single whole. All my efforts were focused on trying to preserve that unity. Incidentally, more and more statements are heard today, including some by participants in the Belovezh accord, that the "soft form of Union Gorbachev proposed" might have protected our nations and nationalities from painful experiences. But, as the saying goes, the train has already left the station.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

Training , Effort , Pain , Country

“The evil arising from mental improvement can be corrected only by a still further progress in that very improvement. Either morality is a fable, or the more enlightened we are, the more attached to it we become.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) Swiss author

The Influence of Literature upon Society (De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 1800), Pt. 2, ch. 4

Evil

“Toleration, as it is now widely preached, may be a very one-sided bargain. It will not do to let falsehood and moral idiocy say to truth and honesty, "I will tolerate you if you will tolerate me."”

Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) English poet

Magna Moralia XLII, p. 193.
The Rod, the Root, and the Flower (1895)

Truth

“Without doubt, a truly mighty and powerful person is not one who can move a mountain from its place, not in the least. True courage is to muster the strength to reform one's morals.”

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908) religious figure

Source: Malfuzat,Vol.1,p.136 to 137

Mountain , Courage , Personality

“You talk of Paine with more respect than he deserves: He is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learnd the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of Study or thinking—for the use of it. ... [Paine] possesses nothing more than what a man whose audacity makes him careless of logical consequences, and his total want of honour and morality makes indifferent as to political consequences, may very easily write. They indeed who seriously write upon a principle of levelling ought to be answerd by the Magistrate—and not by the Speculatist.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to William Cusac Smith (22 July 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), pp. 303-304
1790s

Pain , Study , Indifference , Learning

“A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality—that of his masters.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938), p. 78

Evil

“Today in Germany the winner of the last Nobel peace prize is considered a traitor, and to attend any peace meeting would make one a candidate for a concentration camp. Today in Italy there is only one morality: the power and glory of Italy. Today in Russia all children are brought up to despise and hate ‘the class enemy.’”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 35

Peace , Children , Making love , Hate

“Our nation is founded on the principle that we do not have kings. We have presidents. And the Constitution is our compass. When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something. To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?'”

John Lewis (civil rights leader) (1940) American politician and civil rights leader

For some, he concluded, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.
Source: Quoted in Impeachment is Over, But Don’t Despair by Diallo Brooks, CounterPunch https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/07/impeachment-is-over-but-dont-despair/, (7 Feb 2020)

Children

“Even the victor in a just cause is susceptible to the passions which war arouses. Every inhuman feeling is at once exacerbated. Truth, decency, morality, justice are the first casualties in any war. The accumulated effect makes a just settlement impossible. ... The pacifist treasures justice, liberty; but he believes that they can only be lastingly secured by peaceable means and that the use of force will only contaminate them. ... Armaments themselves provide an independent cause of war owing to the suspicion and fear which they breed. ... Unilateral disarmament offers the only way to escape once the policy of collateral disarmament has failed.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Source: Article in Young Oxford and War (1934), quoted in Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot (1994), p. 30

Justice , War , Truth , Passion

“There is one thing that is eating the heart out of India, and that is modern materialism. There is one thing which is poisoning the mind of India, and that is the kind of science which is the teacher of materialism and works against Spirituality in the mind. How should I be able to tell you of the moral regeneration of India unless first I can strike at that which is piercing her heart and sucking out her very lifeblood. So--as I have been trained in the science of the West, trained in the knowledge of the physical Universe which is so much used to make men believe that nothing but the physical remains--I take for my first subject this undermining of materialism by science, and I attack it with the weapons that were once used to build it up.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Essays and Addresses, Vol. III- Evolution and Occultism (1913)

Heart , Teachers , Knowledge , Universe

“Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information "superhighway" now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness — and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is no question that information, in and of itself, is useless and that as more data is generated, ethical and moral decisions are taking on a fantasy dimension in which a "lack of evidence to indict" is the moral equivalent of the good deed.”

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005) American writer

Foreword to Words of Power: Voices from Indian America (1994), also quoted in "Vine Deloria, Jr." at Indigenous Peoples Literature (2015) by Glen Welker http://www.indigenouspeople.net/vine.htm

Question , People , Knowledge , Decision

“No sooner was the Baltic open to our merchants, than corn was bought up there for importation into England; at the same time the continent was glutted with English goods, which, because the supply greatly exceeded the demand, were sold at less than their prime cost, and upon which the foreign governments soon laid new duties...to prevent the ruin of their own manufactures. This might have been a salutary lesson, if nations were ever rendered wise by experience; it might have taught us that, however willing one part of this nation might be to see the other ruined by the free admission of foreign grain, foreign governments would never consent to have their fabrics destroyed by the unrestricted introduction of British goods. It is a sound maxim in politics, whatever it may be in morals, that charity begins at home.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

'On the Corn-Laws', The Quarterly Review, Vol. LI. (March & June 1834), p. 231
1830s

Home , Time , Parting

“There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than in philosophical debates to endeavour to refute any hypothesis by a pretext of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads us into absurdities, 'tis certainly false; but 'tis not certain an opinion is false, because 'tis of dangerous consequence.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 3, Section 2
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

Falseness , Religion

“The Vegetarians may confidently reckon that the new perfect man will not kill and devour other animals, nay, will not kill and devour vegetables, if it is cruel and wrong to do so. Should he after serious moral reflection conclude that vegetable life is as sacred as animal, he will doubtless be clever enough to derive plenty of wholesome food from the mineral kingdom; and should he deem it wrong to ravage even this for so vulgar a purpose as filling his belly, he will doubtless be able to nourish himself without devouring anything at all.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

"The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", part V, pp. 79–80
Essays and Phantasies (1881)

Confidence , Food , Animals , Perfection

“If you are confident in your ethics and morals, you shouldn’t concern yourself with the thought of how you will be with money.”

Isaac Mashman (2000) businessman, speaker

Money , Self-confidence , Confidence

“Cotton is to-day by far the most important textile used by mankind, and wool is next. And we may expect that this sartorial reform, already so far advanced, will go on, and that the more enlightened generations of the future, for both moral and economic reasons, will clothe themselves entirely in fabrics of bloodless origin.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Cost of a Skin, p. 74

Clothes , Future

“Morality, to be effective, has to be well-reasoned. To want to repress evil only by coercion, and to obtain morality by a kind of education using constraint, without motivating it from within, is to make an artificial thing, devoid of lasting value.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 59.

Motivation , Education , Making love , Evil

“Nations are nothing but morals: If their morals disappear, they disappear.”

Ahmed Shawqi (1868–1932) Egyptian poet and dramatist

https://www.aldiwan.net/poem7890.html
Original: (sd) وَإِنَّمَا الْأُمَمُ الْأَخْلَاقُ مَا بَقِيَتْ / فَإِنْ هُمُ ذَهَبَتْ أَخْلَاقُهُمْ ذَهَبُوا

“For my own part I am deeply convinced that all excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste—for that is a comparatively trifling matter—but a great political and a great moral evil. It is a characteristic of the mischief which arise from financial prodigality, that they creep onwards with a noiseless and surreptitious step; that they are unseen and unfelt until they have reached a magnitude absolutely overwhelming, and then at length, we see them, as perhaps they now exist in the case of one at least among the great European nations, so fearful and menacing in their aspect that they seem to threaten the very foundations of national existence.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1861/apr/15/first-night#column_595 in the House of Commons (15 April 1861)
1860s

Parting , Fear , Evil , Country

“Either there is or there is not a mechanism for enforcing human rights. If there is not, it would seem that calling them 'rights' simply means that we think it would (morally) be a good idea if they were enforced, although, of course, they are not. A 'human right' is an inherently vacuous conception, and to speak of 'human rights' is a kind of puffery or white magic.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

Pg 144
History and Illusion in Politics (2001)

Idea , Thinking

“Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’”

Douglas Murray (1979) British political commentator and far-right activist

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

Hell , Time , Thinking , Age

“Corporations are good things. They encourage people to take risk. They're smart vehicles for building wealth, but they also have to be controlled. ...The reason is, they are soulless entities. A corporation has no morals and its purpose is to make money.”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

The Tyrant Next Time (November 7, 2019)

Money , Wealth , Making love , People