Quotations: Morals

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov

Good manners and good morals are sworn friends and fast allies.
C. A. Bartol

Public morals are natural complements of all laws: they are by themselves an entire code.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Morals are private. Decency is public.
Rita Mae Brown

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
G. K. Chesterton

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
Confucius

The main object of conciliation lies in reaching a solution to a case based upon morals and with a warm heart
Confucius

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.
Noel Coward

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.
Denis Diderot

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right
Salvor Hardin

Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
Patrick Henry

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.
Herbert Hoover

In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
Anna Jameson

My views and feelings are in favor of the abolition of war--and I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair.
Thomas Jefferson

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
Vladimir Lenin

Easy is an adjective used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man.
Nancy Linn-Desmond

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Lazarus Long

Politics have no relation to morals.
Niccolo Machiavelli

Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals
Niccolo Machiavelli

Good laws have their origins in bad morals.
Ambrosius Macrobius

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
Horace Mann

There are people accusing me that I'm sick, that I'm a danger to morals, western civilization and basically everything under the sun. And they've got these wild stories about me, completely off the wall, completely untrue. They thought them up and it makes you wonder what goes on in their brain, but of course, they don't consider themselves sick. They think they're normal because they don't dress like I do.
Marilyn Manson

Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
Henry Louis Mencken

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.
George Jean Nathan

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a meance to society.
Theodore Roosevelt

The soul is the captain and ruler of the life of morals.
Sallust

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals
Albert Schweitzer

The nations morals are like its teeth, the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them
George Bernard Shaw

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Susan Sontag

Golf is a game not just of manners but of morals.
Art Spander

To have respect for ourselves guides our morals; and to have a deference for others governs our manners.
Lawrence Sterne

One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.
Sterne

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it , they are wrong.
Robert Louis Stevenson

A person educated in mind and not in morals is a menace to society
Juanita Kidd Stout

When the sun comes up, I have morals again.
Elizabeth Taylor

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.
Alexis de Tocqueville

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet
Mark Twain

We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books theoretically, at least.
Mark Twain

Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them.
Mark Twain

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