We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!
—William Lloyd Garrison
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Our ideals are our better selves.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
What we call evil is only a necessary moment in our endless development.
—Franz Kafka
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
—G. K. Chesterton
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air, and water. Men can employ it as a tool, or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
—Lewis H. Lapham
There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
—Denis Diderot
Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.
—Barbara Kingsolver
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can, and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
—Aldous Huxley
I am, and always have been, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
—George Bernard Shaw
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
—Albert Einstein
Laws bind us. But it is important to remember the law is only what is popular. Not what's right or wrong.
—Marilyn Manson
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority.… All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
—H. L. Mencken