Quotes & Sayings About Moral Values

In a world where so much seems to be hidden by the smoke of falsity and moral degeneration, we Americans must grasp firmly the ideals which have made this country great. We must reaffirm the basic human values that have guided our forefathers. A revival of old-fashioned patriotism and a grateful acknowledgment of what our country has done for us would be good for all our souls. — Manton S. Eddy

The events we have passed through form a coherent pattern and the political actors who have shaped the world are rational
if not necessarily moral or decent
actors. Americans tend to think of its leaders as fools and knaves and of its enemies as psychotic. This seems to comfort us. While America's leaders might be knaves, they are not fools, and while our enemies might have utterly different moral values that are repugnant to us, they are far from insane. — George Friedman

War does not only kill soldiers and warriors. It also kills rules and moral values. No! Those cannot be killed. War kills the pretense at rules and moral values. It also kills the pretense of being human beings... — Sweety Shinde

Philosophy has been described as thinking about thinking, and all Christians should do that. The term comes from two Greek words, philia ("love") and sophia ("wisdom"), thus "loving wisdom." Nothing anti-Christian appears in that definition. Problems arise if we seek wisdom apart from God, or elevate human reason above Him, but according to Proverbs 4:5-7, God's people should love and seek wisdom.
Formal philosophy is divided into three major areas-incidentally, all core Christian issues: (1) Metaphysics,
which asks questions about the nature of reality: "What is real?" "Is the basic essence of the world matter, or spirit, or something else?" (2) Epistemology, which addresses issues concerning truth and knowledge: "What do we know?" "How do we know it?" "Why do we think it's true?" (3) Ethics, which considers moral problems: "What is right and wrong?" "Are moral values absolute or relative?" "What is the good life, and how do we achieve it? — Rick Cornish

The supposed "secular" values atheists hold dear are in fact borrowed Christian values. Our society is respectful of any creed, or lack thereof, not because it embraces an illusory, non-existent secular morality, but because it is rooted in Christian faith. Christopher Dawson noted that "we cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion." Because moral values are always a religious product, and Western moral values are a product of Christianity. Our values, what we believe has a value beyond and above our self-interest, are grounded in religious faith or are not grounded at all. — Giorgio Roversi

The most valuable thing a teacher can impart to children is not knowledge and understanding per se but a longing for knowledge and understanding, and an appreciation for intellectual values, whether they be artistic, scientific, or moral. It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. Most teachers waste their time by asking questions that are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning is to discover what the pupil does know or is capable of knowing. — Albert Einstein

I'm proud of where I come from. A lot of people leave Mississippi, and their claim to fame is somewhere else. But I have so many moral values that made me the person I am now. — Steve McNair

Budgets are moral documents. Federal funding should reflect the priorities and the values of the majority of the American people. — Mike Pence

There's a difference, in other words, between God's values that please Him (moral will) and those events that He causes to happen (decreed will).15 — Francis Chan

A nation's budget is full of moral implications; it tells what a society cares about and what it does not care about; it tells what its values are. — J. William Fulbright

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject. — Geoffrey Harvey

The main cause of the ineffectiveness of British propaganda is that those directing it seem to have lost their own belief in the peculiar values of English civilization or to be completely ignorant of the main points on which it differs from that of other people. The Left intelligentsia indeed, have so long worshiped foreign gods that they seem to have become almost incapable of seeing any good in the characteristic English institutions and traditions. That the moral values on which most of them pride themselves are largely the product of the institutions they are out to destroy, these socialists cannot, of course, admit. — Friedrich Hayek

True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests valyes and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action. — John Gardner

The great and only possible dignity of man lies in his power deliberately to choose certain moral values by which to live as steadfastly as if he, too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of time. Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence. As far as we know, as far as there exists any kind of empiric evidence, there is no way to beat the beat the game of being against non-being, in which non-being is the predestined victor on realistic levels. — Tennessee Williams

The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group. — Lawrence Kohlberg

It's so dangerous to idealize anything, or anyone, or any place, because it gives that thing or person or place a kind of permission to not have to change, and not have to evolve. It encourages us to bury our heads in the sand, or in values that are really morally neutral but that we pretend are moral goods: tradition, community and family for example. — Lynn Coady

We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and aesthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. — Lewis Mumford

Every generation has been given the same blueprint to follow for the good of society. When that blueprint is disregarded by parents and those in leadership positions, the chain is broken and the human race suffers. — Ellen J. Barrier

Conservatives value economic liberty and moral security, while the liberal values economic security and moral liberty. — Jonah Goldberg

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. — Ayn Rand

Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing. — Niall Ferguson

A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits - marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education to further. — John Dewey

As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away. — Scott Donaldson

Let us cultivate love and compassion, both of which give life true meaning. This is the religion I preach. It is simple. Its temple is the heart. Its teaching is love and compassion. Its moral values are loving and respecting others, whoever they may be. Whether one is a lay person or a monastic, we have no other option if we wish to survive in this world. — Dalai Lama

This struggle between good and evil, fresh and stale, new and decrepit,
between the vigor of moral youth and the dotage of senility, is of positive benefit, for it keeps the perennial moral values alive — Fazlur Rahman

The first question we must address deals with optimism, the possibility of achieving our goal. Are we in a position where we can actually hope to effect change? Assuming we become convinced that there are reasons for optimism, we move to the next question. Are we cetain that we want change? The stories about EHMs, jackals, and suffering around the globe strike raw nerves, but now we demand absolute proof that our grievances justify the efforts change will demand. Third: Is there a unifying principle that will validate our efforts? We look to ascertain that we are not merely seeking to impose our moral, religious, or philosophical values on others but instead are intent on creating something of true and lasting universal benefit. And finally: What can we each do? You and I personally need to evaluate our talents and passions. What are our individual options and desires? How do they fit into the bigger picture? — John Perkins

Capitalism is not merely a system for the efficient production and distribution of goods and services; it also incarnates and promotes a particular moral order, an institutionalized normative worldview comprising and fostering particular assumptions, narratives, commitments, beliefs, values, and goals. — Christian Smith

In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values ... History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us. — Margaret MacMillan

The moral values, ethical codes and laws that guide our choices in normal times are, if anything, even more important to help us navigate the confusing and disorienting time of a disaster. — Sheri Fink

The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity - the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality. — Will Herberg

Dulles was fortunate to find someone like Mary, a woman whose morals were conveniently flexible - or, as she herself put it, a woman with a "sophisticated point of view." She had a curious way of explaining her moral dexterity, but Dulles certainly would have endorsed her way of thinking. "In order to engage in intelligence work successfully," Mary observed, "it was essential to have a very clear-cut idea of your own moral values, so that if you were forced by necessity to break them, you were fully conscious of what you were doing and why. — David Talbot

From the day I started to think politically and to develop my own moral values, from my earliest youth, I have been an ardent defender of Israel. — Steven Spielberg

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions. — Francis Schaeffer

You take pride in setting no limit to your endurance, Mr. Rearden, because you think that you are doing right. What if you aren't? What if you're placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect and admire? Why don't you uphold your own code of values among men as you do among iron smelters? You who won't allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal - what have you allowed into your moral code? — Ayn Rand

There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility. — Sonia Sotomayor

Isaac's son Jacob has a daughter, Dinah. Dinah is kidnapped and raped - apparently a customary form of courtship at the time, since the rapist's family then offers to purchase her from her own family as a wife for the rapist. Dinah's brothers explain that an important moral principle stands in the way of this transaction: the rapist is uncircumcised. So they make a counteroffer: if all the men in the rapist's hometown cut off their foreskins, Dinah will be theirs. While the men are incapacitated with bleeding penises, the brothers invade the city, plunder and destroy it, massacre the men, and carry off the women and children. When Jacob worries that neighboring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain that it was worth the risk: "Should our sister be treated like a whore?" 13 Soon afterward they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery. — Steven Pinker

Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. — Ayn Rand

If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team. — Jonathan Haidt

Christian consciousness experiences itself in a curious sense as LIBERATED TO FAIL, without intolerable damage to self-esteem and without any reduction of moral seriousness. We are free to be inadequate, free to foul things up, and yet affirm ourselves in a more basic sense than the secular moralist or humanistic idealist (who can affirm themselves only on the basis of merits and accomplishments. We are free to choose and deny finite values, free to take constructive guilt upon us and to see it as an inevitable and providentially given aspect of our fallen human condition.
All that we have said leads us to the pinnacle of this good news: In Jesus Christ we need no longer be guilty before God. It is only before our clay-footed gods that we stand guilty! — Thomas C. Oden

My parents did great and provided well, and gave all their kids personal, moral, ethical values, not a belief that we were entitled to something. — Bonnie Hammer

But to conservatives whose value system gives priority to Moral Strength, the problem of drugs is the personal lack of the moral strength to just say no. It is a problem of personal values, not of social change or drug treatment centers. — George Lakoff

The ruinous abdication by philosophy of its rightful domain is the consequence of the oblivion of philosophers to a great insight first beheld clearly by Socrates and re-affirmed by Kant as by no other philosopher. Science, concerned solely and exclusively with objective existents, cannot give answers to questions about meanings and values. Only ideas engendered by the mind and to be found nowhere but in the mind (Socrates), only the pure transcendental forms supplied by reason (Kant), can secure the ideals and values and put us in touch with the realities that constitute our moral and spiritual life. Twenty-four centuries after Socrates, two centuries after Kant, we badly need to re-learn the lesson. — D.R. Khashaba

For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness. — Matthew Stewart

Guided by nothing but pop culture values, many children no longer learn how to think about morality and virtue, or to think of them at all. They grow up with no shared moral framework, believing that the highest values are diversity, tolerance and non-judgmentalism. — Gary Bauer

A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature. — Steven Pinker

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we've become. — D. Todd Christofferson

Bobbing and weaving are methods and maneuvers by which we bend ethics, water down morals, and parse down values to serve our agendas. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Moral authority is another way to define servant leadership because it represents a reciprocal choice between leader and follower. If the leader is principle centered, he or she will develop moral authority. If the follower is principle centered, he or she will follow the leader. In this sense, both leaders and followers are followers. Why? They follow truth. They follow natural law. They follow principles. They follow a common, agreed-upon vision. They share values. They grow to trust one another. — Robert K. Greenleaf

Parents now are concerned about the moral and spiritual diseases. These can have terrible complications when standards and values are abandoned. We must all take protective measures. — Boyd K. Packer

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we're confronted with is, in Sartre's words, "the bare, valueless fact of existence." Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning. — William Lane Craig

The world in which we now live is a world whose outlook is so distorted that we absolutize what is relative (money-making, power, success) and relativize what is absolute (truth, moral values, and God). — Alice Von Hildebrand

My own ongoing research among secular Americans-as well as that of a handful of other social scientists who have only recently turned their gaze on secular culture-confirms that nonreligious family life is replete with its own sustaining moral values and enriching ethical precepts. — Phil Zuckerman

A too constant preoccupation with money may seem to indicate the lack of a proper sense of moral values, but [let] those who have always had money ... be without it for a while, and they will soon discover how quickly it becomes their chief concern. — Moss Hart

At the heart of our public morality is the idea that he who gives generously is most virtuous and morally praiseworthy; that there is no greater citizen than she who sacrifices; and that there is no greater measure of worth than contribution. These are values we can be proud of. After all, there is no moral system or religion on earth where the guiding ethic is grab more for yourself. — Eric Liu

A person who has a criminal mind and would be punished by the referees and they will remain in isolation from others as an opportunity for them to reform. When he or she get released from his or her referees' custody, he or she would have a better understanding about the ethical and moral values of his or her society and not make the same mistake again. — Saaif Alam

The USA experiences the crisis of ideological and moral values. — Vladimir Zhirinovsky

Napoleon, who had an aversion to the moral laxity of the eighteenth century, which he blamed on the domination of society by women, was determined to reform family life on Roman, or perhaps rather on Corsican, principles. It was with him, not with Queen Victoria, that Victorian morality originated. — J. Christopher Herold

The two [Greco-Roman and Latin] worlds also had enough unifying elements, however, to be considered a single continent. First of all, both the East and the West were the heirs to the Bible and to the ancient Church, which in both worlds refer beyond themselves to an origin that lies outside today's Europe, namely in Palestine. Secondly, both shared the idea of the Roman Empire and of the essential nature of the Church, and therefore of law and legal instruments. The last factor I would mention is monasticism, which throughout the great upheavals of history continued to be the indispensable bearer not only of cultural continuity but above all of fundamental religious and moral values, of the ultimate guidance of humankind. As a pre-political and supra-political force, monasticism was also the bringer of ever-welcome and necessary rebirths of culture and civilization. — Pope Benedict XVI

Without moral values, which should begin in Congress, America will lose her roots, her basis, her thesis. — Janine Turner

Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality - you who have never known any - but to discover it. — Ayn Rand

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments. — Ayn Rand

Any county's moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women - especially its young women. Wherever ... spiritual values have been submerged, if not destroyed, by an emphasis upon ... material things, invariably the women reflect it. — Malcolm X

But why must the system go to such lengths to block our empathy? Why all the psychological acrobatics? The answer is simple: because we care about animals, and we don't want them to suffer. And because we eat them. Our values and behaviors are incongruent, and this incongruence causes us a certain degree of moral discomfort. In order to alleviate this discomfort, we have three choices: we can change our values to match our behaviors, we can change our behaviors to match our values, or we can change our perception of our behaviors so that they appear to match our values. It is around this third option that our schema of meat is shaped. As long as we neither value unnecessary animal suffering nor stop eating animals, our schema will distort our perceptions of animals and the meat we eat, so that we feel comfortable enough to consume them. And the system that constructs our schema of meat equips us with the means by which to do this. — Melanie Joy

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag. — David Bentley Hart

As a general rule, when something gets elevated to apple-pie status in the hierarchy of American values, you have to suspect that its actual monetary value is skidding toward zero. Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent. Same thing with work: would we be so reverent about the 'work ethic' if it wasn't for the fact that the average working stiff's hourly pay is shrinking, year by year ... — Barbara Ehrenreich

Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more. — Romain Gary

Moral values have been thrown out the window. Christianity is out the window. And that's wrong. Parents should be at home, teaching kids right from wrong, making sure they get a great education so they can be a success in life. — Albert Belle

The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power. — Robert D. Kaplan

"Teachers" ... treat students neither coercively nor instrumentally but as joint seekers of truth and of mutual actualization. They help students define moral values not by imposing their own moralities on them but by positing situations that pose hard moral choices and then encouraging conflict and debate. They seek to help students rise to higher stages of moral reasoning and hence to higher levels of principled judgment. — James MacGregor Burns

I have long been fascinated by our inclination to assume others we meet have the same moral code, similar values, and yet we can never be sure. — Jane Green

Women's rights, men's rights-human rights-all are threatened by the everpresent specter of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat. — Rosika Schwimmer

It is interesting to me that the secularizers bend over backward in our federally controlled schools to keep atheists from being offended by the mention of God, prayer, or morality, yet over the federally controlled airwaves Christians can be offended every day of the week by the broadcasting of blasphemy against God and the Lord Jesus Christ or attacks on our moral values. — Tim LaHaye

This may be why Einstein once said; "Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind." The fact is that we need the insights of the mystic every bit as much as we need the insights of the scientist. Mankind is diminished when either is missing. — Michael Crichton

Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners. — Geoffrey Miller

Since belief determines behavior, doesn't it make sense that we should be teaching ethical, moral values in every home and in every school in America? — Zig Ziglar

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people. — Andrew Mellon

I believe in a real democratic system, with a state of law and freedom of the press. I believe in a free, open-market economy integrated with the world. And I believe in equality of opportunity. Those are my basic beliefs. On top of that, of course, I believe in some moral values. — Sebastian Pinera

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge
he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil
he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor
he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire
he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy
all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was
that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love
he was not man. — Ayn Rand

It's all a matter of perception.
What one person deems to be important may be just as equally unimportant to another.
What one deems to be right may seem very wrong to someone else.
Your moral compass and values may not always be totally in sync with others you meet.
In the end it's all just your perception of how you choose to live your life and this may not always win you friends. In fact it may gain you some enemies.
Live your life how you choose to and if people don't like the way you do things then disagree if you must, but be nice & be respectful and then if you must, move on and leave it all behind you.
It's your life after all and only you can live it. Choose your path and set your compass then start walking. — Michael Tianias

The way to improve our schools is not more money, but the reintroduction of moral and spiritual values, as well as the four R's: reading, 'riting, 'rithmatic, and Rush. — Rush Limbaugh

Tensions exist in any free society. But the freedom we enjoy rests on a foundation of individual liberty and shared moral values. — Tipper Gore

In today's society, people use those qualities - I call them qualities - for all things. It is for self-gratification. It is for sex. It is for excitment. This kind of fervor servers it's own purpose. It doesn't obey rules. It runs amok. You see it on the news everyday, but society cannot hang it's moral and ethical values on me to survive. i do what I must in all ways, and I'm proud of it. The necessity to be myself passes all moral barriers. — Richard Ramirez

We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

That economics is untrue which ignores or disregards moral values. — Mahatma Gandhi

I am what I want. What I seek to consume, possess, and achieve is a mirror that reflects my lusts and cravings, values and priorities, and moral boundaries or lack thereof. — Jane Velez-Mitchell

The budgets we work on in Congress are more than just fiscal documents; they are a reflection of our moral values as well. In choosing where to spend money, members of Congress choose what priorities they value. — Tim Walz

But we can't ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women's freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people. — Bret Easton Ellis

Under theocracies and other authoritarian regimes, the rulers are the moral authorities. Under genuine democracy some basic values are entrenched in the legal system, which is expected to be under democratic vigilance, and others are left to the person or the group, which ideally debate moral problems in a rational, free and cooperative manner. — Mario Bunge

I don't know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don't understand are at work. I cannot believe that God "sends" illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. "What did I do to deserve this?" is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is "If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?" As we saw in the previous chapter, it becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don't hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world. — Harold S. Kushner

Lindbergh expressed these thoughts in a splendid speech while accepting the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy at the Washington Aero Club in January 1946. Titling his speech "Honoring the Wright Brothers," he took as his theme "the way in which science was divorcing man from his old sense of independence and moral values."16 — Winston Groom

To Friedman, a free society is a more moral society, because it respects the moral primacy of the individual. It is only through their own free choices that people express their values, and therefore their individuality and their humanity. Without that freedom, we count no more than sheep. To be truly human, we must be free, and responsible for our own actions. The majority may not approve of what we choose, or may think they know what is best for us; but that gives them no right to dictate what we may drink or inject, nor to force us into military service, nor to steal our property and income for their own purposes. — Eamonn Butler

Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious, moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions. — Adolf Hitler

When a society removes moral responsibility by belief that the acquisition of knowledge comes from an unknown and mysterious venue, it loses its ability for rational conceptualization of values because they are stripped from the reality of this life and placed in an imaginary next life, which is a recipe for disaster. — Al Stefanelli

No one culture has ever developed all human potentialities; it has always selected certain capacities, mental and emotional and moral, and stifled others. Each culture is a system of values which may well complement the values in another. — Ruth Benedict

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased. — Ma Jian

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. — Robert Wright

All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work - and that which is its source - as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost.. — Ayn Rand

No one is born with good character; it's not a hereditary trait. And it isn't determined by a single noble act. Character is established by conscientious adherence to moral values, not by lofty rhetoric or good intentions. — Michael Josephson

We are going to file a suit to the Hague tribunal, which must investigate into these crimes against humanity, it is a test for humanity and moral dignity. Because turning a blind eye to such horrible and shameful crimes means indulging terrorists and aggressors and violating high European values for which Ukrainians are suffering and dying. — Petro Poroshenko

The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. — Steven Pinker