Morality

“It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American”

“The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.”

“The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”

“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”

“Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.”

“In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them.Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.”

“The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.”

“HOW TO CHOOSE A GREAT LEADERChoose a leader who will invest in Building bridges, not walls.Books, not weapons.Morality, not corruption.Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance.Stability, not fear and terror.Peace, not chaos.Love, not hate.Convergence, not segregation.Tolerance, not discrimination.Fairness, not hypocrisy.Substance, not superficiality.Character, not immaturity.Transparency, not secrecy.Justice, not lawlessness.Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction.Truth, not lies.”

“If there is any societyamong robbers and murderers, they must at least. . . .abstainfrom robbing and murdering one another. So beneficenceis less essential than justice is to the existence of society; alack of beneficence will make a society uncomfortable, butthe prevalence of injustice will utterly destroy it.”

“Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.”

“We have seen, therefore, that I am not allowed even to *assume*, for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason *God, freedom, immortality*, unless at the same time *I deprive* speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insights. Reason, namely, in order to arrive at these, must employ principles which extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if in spite of this they are applied also to what cannot be an object of experience, actually always change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical *expansion* of pure reason impossible. Hence I had to suspend *knowledge* in order to make room for *belief*. For the dogmatism of metaphysics without a preceding critique of pure reason, is the source of all that disbelief which opposes morality and which is always very dogmatic." ―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 25-26”

“Honor is simply the morality of superior men.”

“Believe me, Eugenie, the words "vice" and "virtue" supply us only with local meanings. There is no action, however bizarre you may picture it, that is truly criminal; or one that can really be called virtuous. Everything depends on our customs and on the climates we live in. What is considered a crime here is often a virtue a few hundred leagues away; and the virtues of another hemisphere might, quite conversely, be regarded as crimes among us. There is no atrocity that hasn't been deified, no virtue that hasn't been stigmatized.”

“Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: ‘Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred.”

“He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it?”

“It is vital that parents have the courage to speak up and intervene before Satan succeeds. President Boyd K. Packer has taught that “when morality is involved, we have both the right and the obligation to raise a warning voice.”

“The Sun would have wasted its life but for the evolution of life on earth. The one who gives should be grateful to the one who receives.”

“In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or power will keep a mistress and a few girlfriends on the side. Only in America, still suffering from its grotesque, hypocritical Puritan heritage, do we persist in attempting to deny and repeal a million years of basic primate biology.”

“I really believe that you grow up a certain way in New York. There's a New York morality, a sense of loyalty. You know how to win and lose. There's a thousand kids outside, you know who to push and who not to push. There's a sixth sense you develop just because it's New York.”

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”