Morality

“There are no good or evil people. There is only a great, unfathomable mob trampling itself underfoot. The life-giving sources of the old morality have dried up and vanished in the sands of oblivion. There's no other source to draw from, no place to refresh oneself. There is no example, no inspiration. It is night. A night of indifference, apathy, chaos.”

“The line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people’s litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.”

“Contemporary attitudes toward urban parks fall into three levels of sophistication. The first, the most naive assumption, is that parks are just plots of land preserved in their original state. If asked to discuss the issue at all, many laymen have maintained this much, that parks are bits of nature created only in the sense that some decision was made not to build on the land. Many are surprised to learn that parks that an artifact conceived and deliberated as carefully as public buildings, with both physical shape and social usage taken into account. The second, a little more informed, is that parks are aesthetic objects and that their history can be understood in terms of an evolution of artistic styles independent of societal considerations. The third is the view that each of the elements of the urban park represents part of planners' strategy for moral and social reform, so that today, as in the past, the citizen visiting a park is subject to an accumulated set of intended moral lessons.”

“You must never, at any rate, lend yourself to the wrong, in any form, which you condemn.”

“I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.”

“As you try to balance between the socialist and capitalist systems in the world, you will come up against the biggest problem facing humanity today. Jung wrote in 1938 "Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity." Each of these systems promotes itself by pointing out the moral failings of the other, but these moral failings are actually failings brought about by people acting within the context of large organizations. What is truly needed is to learn a structure of organization of human beings that provides for the organized group the same capacity and propensity for moral behavior that is possessed by individuals.”

“George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.”

“It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.”

“Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home”

“Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.”

“...sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.”

“Tyrants are willing to commit to anything…including mass murder to maintain their domination over every human being alive. They abuse the lives of the people they are entrusted with by the perverse dictates that they, themselves, would never live by. And they feel justified in this by their own self-righteous elite morality, which sets them high above everyone else in their own minds.You and I, however, are made of quite different stuff. Our words are filled with our true beliefs and backed by the honesty of our actions. We take great pride in not only who we are…but overcoming the struggle it took to make us this way. We are men and women of character…principles…and courage!”

“Two wrongs don't make a right, but neither does one. Revenge may seem petty by day, but on some nights she becomes Justice.”

“My favorite part about Mare Barrow is her almost selfish survival instinct, as well as her increasingly gray morality. Her character arc in 'Glass Sword' is a lot deeper and more emotional than before, so I'm glad I got to write this sequel and that people want to read it.”

“Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.”

“We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.”

“If you stick your head above the parapet and you have an opinion, and you spout family values and morality and all that, you'd be pretty naive to think that everybody would go, 'Oh, he's great, I love him.'”

“Like tiny gods, all that we say and do holds a power so great that any one of us in any given moment can be responsible for the birth of a new civilization or the collapse of our own.”

“Person who is truly positive in nature suffers a lot but they can find way to jump out of it. In fact any kind of problem they face helps them to create new ideas, indirectly helping society to upgrade positively. But person who is positive only from outer personality always suffers more then person who is truly positive because they can’t find way out of problems for themselves and later for this society.”

“Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.I forget who said it and I no longer care.”