Moral Landscape Quotes & Sayings

The postwar WWII GI Bill of Rights-and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans-signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world. — Peter Drucker

The suburban West is, from a moral perspective, depressing evidence that we have misused our freedom. There is, however, another aspect to the landscape, an unexpected glory. Over the cheap tracts and littered arroyos one sometimes see a light as clean as that recorded by O'Sullivan. Since it owes nothing to our care, it is an assurance; beauty is final. — Robert Adams

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate "when the trees fall and the walls collapse ". At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow. — Salvatore Quasimodo

Because he's three thousand times the human being you'll ever be,' said Alec. 'Now get out of here before I risk his life by waking him up so he can turn you into a garbage fire. Something that would match your personality.'
'Oh!', said Zara. 'So rude! — Cassandra Clare

The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences. — Che Guevara

Had anyone suggested at the time that it would not be the Egypt of the pharaohs that would survive and change the moral landscape of the world, but instead a group of Hebrew slaves, it would have seemed the ultimate absurdity. — Sheila Heti

It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest. — Stendhal

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters. — Edith Wharton

The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms. — Sam Harris

Gender provides a revealing entrance into the world's religious traditions. How gender is viewed reflects itself not simply in the moral practices of those traditions, but in their metaphysics. Gender shapes their worldview and ethos. In Taoism, for example, ultimate reality is feminine, and what is seen as truly powerful is what adapts and adjusts. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam privilege the masculine. For these religions, what counts for ultimately is the power to control and command. Religions are gendered entities, although often presenting themselves as something simply natural or God-ordained, and therefore objective and universal. Viewing the various religions through the lens of gender, opens up a hidden landscape. It reveals what is usually veiled, puts voices into officially sanctioned silences, and makes more complex what we see and hear and learn from the past. It enriches our grasp upon the heritage of the sacred. — John C. Raines

I envy the happiness of others ... I envy the sense of belonging ... I seem always to be remaking myself. — Richard Eyre

Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be. Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative. — Maureen Howard

The historian William Cronon explains that packing plants
'distanced their customers most of all from the act of killing ... The more people became accustomed to the attractively cut, carefully wrapped, cunningly displayed packages that Swift had introduced to the trade, the more easily they could fail to remember that their purchase had once pulsed and breathed with a life much like their own ... As time went on, fewer of those who ate meat could say they had actually killed the animals themselves. In the packer's world, it was easy not to remember that eating meat was a moral act inextricably bound to killing. Such was the second nature that a corporate order had imposed on the American landscape. Forgetfulness was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products. — Steven M. Wise

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature. — John Berger

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape . — Robert Charles Wilson

The time you've got me running. The time, you've got me tired. Well I've got more for the world than this.And I've got love that I need to give. — Tegan Quin

We may experience moments of profound inner peace, a sense of oneness with nature, or a sense of something that is more important that we're not reaching by the usual goals of human society. Perhaps we could say there's a common heart to all the religions. — Thomas Keating

The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else. — Oswald Chambers