Dinah Maria Mulock Quotes

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

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.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

As long as the decent people refuse to believe that morality must manifest itself in every sphere of human activity, including the political, they will not meet the challenge of Marxism.

As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

Ethics is inescapable.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

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

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, … a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.

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