Charles Sumner Quotes

All effective actions require the passport of morality.

You can't be right by doing wrong; you can't be wrong by doing right.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

If you are doing something for reward or punishment, you do not have morality.

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.

Is it truly being good if the only reason I behave well is so I can get more loot at Christmas? I mean, really, all I'm doing is saying I can be bribed.

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.

. . . when we cannot do the good we would, we must be ready to do the good we can.

You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man.

Ethics and power are separate. Ethics and morality. I think life would be miserable if there weren't some kind of code that people operated by, but history is full of many, many people who have gotten power by very unethical means, and people who were very ethical, who get no power, people who have the most brilliant, lovely, wonderful, nice intentions and bring about horrible things in the world because they don't know how to play the power game.

A good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself which the neglect of legislators had forgotten to supply.

Do the right thing even if it means dying like a dog when no one's there to see you do it.

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

Civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.

Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

All acts of living become bad by ten things, and by avoiding the ten things they become good. There are three evils of the body, four evils of the tongue, and three evils of the mind.

Justice is inseparable from truth in human life.

There's a morality... I think there's a moral compass but whether that comes from religion or just from being a good person, and where one starts and the other begins... I'm a good person, I hope. But I'm never as good as I want to be, never as nice as I want to be, never as generous as I want to be.

I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.

The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.

Political interest [can] never be separated in the long run from moral right.