The thing that alarms me is that there are so many clergymen who say that the so-called ‚new morality‘ is all right. They say we’re living in a new generation; let’s be relevant, let’s change God’s law. Let’s say that adultery is all right under certain circumstances; fornication’s all right under certain circumstances. If it’s ‚meaningful.‘

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

It’s much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won’t keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don’t know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we’ve got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, ‚Is this it? Are we still relevant?‘

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Justice is truth in action.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

What is permissible is not always honorable.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Better than worshiping gods is obedience to the laws of righteousness.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbor as yourself.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

I think you have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.

Morality is contraband in war.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Effective action is always unjust.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

There is a moral obligation that those who have should give to those who don’t.