Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

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

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

We tell lies, yet it is easy to show that lying is immoral.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I add this, that rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists‘ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?

My future is righteousness.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

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.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, content to dwell in decencies for ever.

If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.

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

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

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

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.

True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

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

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

You see, rebellion, and the disobedience it causes, keeps us from having the power of God that’s available to us as Christians.

Justice is truth in action.

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

The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

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

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.