Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

Christian ethics are seldom found save in the philosophy of some unbeliever.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

All good moral philosophy is ... but the handmaid to religion.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity.

At the heart of Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

It is through truth & non-violence that I can have some glimpse of God. Truth & non-violence are my God. They are the obverse and reverse of the same coin.

One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

There was never law, or sect, or opinion did so much magnify goodness, as the Christian religion doth.

Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.

Atheists are pious people.

There are only Epicureans, either crude or refined; Christ was the most refined.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

"Religious Socialism," "Christian Socialism," are expressions implying a contradiction in terms.

I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

There are many religions, but there is only one morality.