Moral Quotes

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

Martin Luther King Jr

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Henry Louis Mencken

A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society

Thomas Jefferson

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience...

Joseph Conrad

The major Jewish dietary laws rest on a single premise: Eating meat is a moral compromise. There is a difference between eating a hamburger and eating a bowl of cereal. For one of them, a living creature had to be killed. Should we ever become so casual about the eating of meat that we lose sight of that distinction, a part of our humanity will have shriveled and died.

Harold Kushner

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

Sigmund Freud

We never reach our ideals, whether of mental or moral improvement, but the thought of them shows us our deficiencies, and spurs us on to higher and better things

Tryon Edwards

Our moral and ethical responsibility is to protect other species in the spirit of husbandry rather than destroy them in and attitude of conquest.

Charles Southwick

I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

Martin Luther King Jr

The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction ... the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.

Leo Tolstoy

Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value. We are neither entitled to be unselfish at someone else's expense nor is there any merit in being unselfish if we have no choice. The members of a society who in all respects are made to do the good thing have no title to praise.

Friedrich August Hayek

Moral courage and character go hand in hand .... a man of real character is consistently courageous, being imbued with a basic integrity and a firm sense of principle.

Martha Boaz

Boys and young men acquire readily the moral sentiments of their social milieu, whatever these sentiments may be.

Bertrand Russell

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values -- that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

Martin Luther King Jr

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

Thomas Jefferson