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Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.
SAMUEL BUTLER, Samuel Butler's Notebooks
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Kavanagh
It's easy enough to preach morality on a full belly.
ERWIN SYLVANUS, Dr. Korczak and the Children
Custom alone regulates morals.
ANATOLE FRANCE, The Revolt of the Angels
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Do What You Will
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
H.L. MENCKEN, A Mencken Chrestomathy
I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true.... If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.
LISA RANDALL, Discover Magazine, July 2006
Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
KARL KRAUS, Morality and Criminal Justice
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE, Jane Eyre
The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality -- to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting -- but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued -- if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing -- are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
AYN RAND, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.
JOEL STEIN, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 24, 2006
Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 19, 1785
Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, leter to Peter Carr, Aug. 19, 1785
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
ALEISTER CROWLEY, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on signs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.
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