Neal A. Maxwell Quotes

There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

There is a higher law than the law of government. That's the law of conscience.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot…change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.

You cannot institute any equality between right and wrong.

Religious institutions ought to have something to say about the normative values of society.

These youngsters hold that all morality is relative but that middle class morality is just plain bad.

I grew up feeling from a very young age that what was right was right, no matter if God or my teacher said so.

Opinion has ever been stronger than law.

Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.

This is God's standards [against same-sex marriage and abortions]. And just because public opinion may have changed or somebody takes a poll - this is just one of the issues. And it doesn't matter what people say or what people think. It doesn't matter about the opinion polls. It's what God says, and God says this is a sin. And it's a sin against him, and he's going to judge sin.

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is what should be. Now, if you're taught to live up to a what should be that never existed - only an occult superstition, no proof of this should be - then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that!

While public opinion might sway back and forth, right and wrong do not.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

There is only one morality, as there is only one geometry.

Right is right though all condemn, and wrong is wrong though all approve.

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.

I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion-the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines.

The absolute good is not a matter of opinion but of nature.

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.