Moralist Quotes & Sayings

If, of course, there is neither freedom nor any moral law based on freedom, but only a state in which everything that happens or can happen simply obeys the mechanical workings of nature, politics would mean the art of utilising nature for the government of men, and this would constitute the whole of practical wisdom; the concept of right would then be only an empty idea. But if we consider it absolutely necessary to couple the concept of right with politics, or even to make it a limiting condition of politics, it must be conceded that the two are compatible. And I can indeed imagine a moral politician, i.e. someone who conceives of the principles of political expediency in such a way that they can co-exist with morality, but I cannot imagine a political moralist, i.e. one who fashions his morality to suit his own advantage as a statesman. — Immanuel Kant

I like pacifists and people who have a heavy emotional identification with deathism and war would probably call me a pacifist, but I am a non-invasivist rather than a non-violentist. That is, I believe that an invaded people have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. This includes putting ground glass or poison in the invaders' food, shooting at them from ambush, sabotage, the general strike, armed revolution, etc. It's up to the invaded to decide which of these techniques they will use. It's not up to some moralist to tell them which techniques are permissible. — Robert Anton Wilson

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. — Marguerite Duras

The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists. — Robert Payne

Cynics are all moralists, and merciless too. — Indro Montanelli

What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk. — Honore De Balzac

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. — E. M. Forster

Self-righteousness is always self-condemnatory. And self-righteousness is the preserve of the moralist. — Timothy Keller

For instance, I had a friend I generally avoided. He rather bored me, and, besides, he was something of a moralist. But when he was on his deathbed, I was there - don't worry ... And when, in addition, it's a suicide! Lord, what a delightful commotion! — Albert Camus

There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an owl-like look, "which always have been and always will be, which can't be changed."
Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly. "Listen to that! That's what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man
a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature. Every person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise. — F Scott Fitzgerald

When a job is undertaken from necessity, or from a grim sense of disagreeable duty, the worker is self-consciously aware of the toils and pains he undergoes ... But when the job is a labor of love, the sacrifices will present themselves to the worker
strange as it may seem
in the guise of enjoyment. Moralists, looking on at this, will always judge that the former kind of sacrifice is more admirable than the later, because the moralist, whatever he may pretend, has far more respect for pride than for love ... I do not mean that there is no nobility in doing unpleasant things from a sense of duty, but only that there is more nobility in doing them gladly out of sheer love of the job. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Thus, all sane moralists admit that one may sometimes tell a lie; but no sane moralist would approve of telling a little boy to practise telling lies, in case he might one day have to tell a justifiable one. — G.K. Chesterton

Let God be good," cried Erasmus the moralist. "Let God be God," replied Luther the theologian. Although — Timothy George

In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel - and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride. — Vladimir Nabokov

I don't much like assuming the tone of a moralist. But the danger of baobabs is so little recognized, and the risks run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid are so considerable, that for once I am making an exception to my habitual reserve. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The public only knows one side of [Mark Mark Twain] - the amusing part. Little does it suspect that he was a man of strong convictions upon political and social questions and a moralist of no mean order. — Andrew Carnegie

Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that. — Jonathan Miller

Man is a political animal by nature; he is a scientist by chance or choice; he is a moralist because he is a man. — Hans Morgenthau

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth. — Samuel Johnson

There can be no creative morality unless man has the possibility of freedom. This is where the moralists make their mistake. If they want man to change his way of life, they must assume that he is free, for if he is not, all the raging and protesting in the world will make no difference. On the other hand, a man who is acting from the fear of a moralist's threats or from the lure of his promises is not making a free act! If man is not free, threats and promises may modify his conduct, but they will not change it in any essential respect. If he is free, threats and promises will not make him use his freedom. — Alan W. Watts

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content. — Henry David Thoreau

The worse one sins, the more of a moralist one becomes. — Caleb Crain

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach. — Walter Lippmann

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing. — C.S. Lewis

Don't make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I'm not. — Madeleine Albright

In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence - the source of human freedom - is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us. We have to rise up against all forms of power - but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good. — Michel Foucault

Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. — Bertrand Russell

Any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply. — Sue Grafton

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact. The artist is not a moralist by conscious intention, but is concerned only with hearing and expressing the vision within his or her own being. But out of the symbols the artist sees and creates - as Giotto created the forms for the Renaissance - there is later hewn the ethical structure of the society. — Rollo May

If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations ... — William Makepeace Thackeray

A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has every understood the term. And the family (which [Michael] Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies. — Lesslie Newbigin

There can be no greater pleasure in life," Stalin is reputed to have said, "than to choose one's enemy, inflict a terrible revenge on him, and go quietly to bed." He might have added, if he really did say this, "secure in the knowledge that one has done good." Committing evil for goodness' sake must surely rank as an even greater pleasure than Stalin's: It satisfies the inner sadist and the inner moralist at the same time. — Theodore Dalrymple

Conscience is a great moralist inside us with a stick in its hand. It is a whip of virtue which oppresses us unmercifully when we do wrong. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort. — Alain Badiou

To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock. — Emma Goldman

As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist. — Timothy Leary

The desperate addict is closer to the heart of grace than the devout moralist. — Tullian Tchividjian

Every institution of our day, the family, the State, our moral codes, sees in every strong, beautiful, uncompromising personality a deadly enemy; therefore every effort is being made to cramp human emotion and originality of thought in the individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist. — Various

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist. — Will Durant

Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check. — John Carroll

But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance. — Frederick Soddy

If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more. — Henry Miller

To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of pictures; to the poet she is a storehouse of images, fancies, a source of inspiration; to the moralist she is a storehouse of precepts and parables; to all she may be a source of knowledge and joy. — John Burroughs

The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a
solipsist. — Kedar Joshi

Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists. — Allen Wheelis

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

Is literature better, is politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher? — G.K. Chesterton

The moralist must praise heroism and condemn cruelty; but the moralist does not explain events. — Georges Lefebvre

There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism. — John Carroll

Rough Johnson, the great moralist. — Lord Byron

However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political.
Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation? — Hans J. Morgenthau

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist ... He plans to be both an artist and a moralist
a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community
that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success. — H.L. Mencken

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary. — Walter Lippmann

So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. — Charles Lamb

I sent letters of enquiry to all persons whose names were given, and received not one reply. There are several ways of explaining. One is that it is probable that persons who have experiences such as those told of in this book, receive so many "crank letters" that they answer none. Dear me - once upon a time, I enjoyed a sense of amusement and superiority toward "cranks". And now here am I, a "crank", myself. Like most writers, I have the moralist somewhere in my composition, and here I warn - take care, oh, reader, with whom you are amused, unless you enjoy laughing at yourself. — Charles Fort

It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. — John Edward Williams

Heard as a moralist's diatribe, the Sermon on the Mount is an impossible-to-bear judgment. Read as a series of mandates for Jesus' disciples, it is an impossible-to-attain standard. Heard as heaven's dream for the creatures made in God's own image, however, the sermon becomes an impossible-to-wait-for world of Eden restored. Read as the Heavenly Father's reality in which we participate as his children by being transformed into the likeness of the one Perfect Son, it is our new-creation identity dawning on us and forming in our daily life habits. This is a righteousness that both fulfills the Law and the Prophets and exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. — Rubel Shelly

Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied 'Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit. — Isabel Paterson

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic. — Stanislaw Lem

One may be an excellent pianist, mathematician, gardener, or scientist and still be cranky and jealous, but in the West one can be considered a great moralist and yet not live by one's moral principles. We must simply recall here the Buddhist requirement that a person and his or her teachings be compatible. Ethics is not like any ordinary science. It must arise from the deepest understanding of human qualities, and such understanding comes only when one undertakes the journey of discovery personally. An ethic that is built exclusively on intellectual ideas and that is not buttressed at every point by virtue, genuine wisdom, and compassion has no solid foundation. — Matthieu Ricard

The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level. — Theodore Roosevelt

I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate as you think, judging me - as you judge me - from my fluency. — Virginia Woolf

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn t? — Quentin Crisp

Admiration is one of the most bewitching, enthusiastic passions of the mind; and every common moralist knows that it arises from novelty and surprise, the inseparable attendants of imposture. — William Warburton

She would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast - at her, the child of honourable parents - at her, the mother of a babe that would hereafter be a woman - at her, who had once been innocent - as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it ... With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact ... The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality. — Julien Benda

Austen is a moralist, but, as John Lauber has put it, she is not a "punitive" moralist. Sometimes her villains receive no more serious punishment than to achieve their desires. Often that is punishment enough. — Peter J. Leithart

In this context, fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world. This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified - like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers - but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity. For the filth theorist, this meant a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity. — Eula Biss

The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee. — George Orwell

The gospel addresses our greatest need and brings change and transformation to every area of life. Let's look at just a few of the ways that the gospel changes us. Discouragement and depression. When a person is depressed, the moralist says, "You are breaking the rules. Repent." On the other hand, the relativist says, "You just need to love and accept yourself." Absent the gospel, the moralist will work on behavior, and the relativist will work on the emotions - and only superficialities will be addressed instead of the heart. Assuming the depression has no physiological base, the gospel will lead us to examine ourselves and say, "Something in my life has become more important than God - a pseudo-savior, a form of works-righteousness." The gospel leads us to embrace repentance, not to merely set our will against superficialities. — Timothy J. Keller

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. — Alan Watts

Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry unfortunately was seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-Man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. — John Howard Yoder

Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist then Pleasure. — George Gordon Byron

Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through. — Philip Guston

It was rightly said of Sade that his is the work of a moralist. Erotic books are almost all alike in this respect: either they are working toward the elaboration of a revolutionary morality, or they echo the morality of their age, against which they are protesting. — Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues

God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put firewood upon it, and trusted Isaac up on top of the wood. His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan: God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two assymetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: 'I was only obeying orders.' Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions. — Richard Dawkins

Here was the rub: one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin. One must sacrifice oneself utterly to God's purposes, even to the point of possibly making moral mistakes. One's obedience to God must be forward-oriented and zealous and free, and to be a mere moralist or pietist would make such a life impossible. — Eric Metaxas

Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone ... — William Butler Yeats