Susan Sontag Quotes

It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.

Conduct is the grand test of character. Words are one great evidence of the condition of the heart.

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.

Intentions are invisible but they are the true test of character.

I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong.

One easily bears moral reproof, but never mockery.

It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad.

Age in a virtuous person, of either sex, carries in it an authority which makes it preferable to all the pleasures of youth.

Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but pass?. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.

I never knew a man who deserved to be thought well of for his morals who had a slight opinion of our Sex in general.

Oh, 'tis not my qualities they object to! 'Tis my lack of vice.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

When a plane crashes and some die while others live, a skeptic calls into question God's moral character, saying that he has chosen some to live and others to die on a whim; yet you say it is your moral right to choose whether the child within you should live or die. Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral. When you decide who should live or die, it's your moral right.

No religion which is narrow and which cannot satisfy the test of reason, will survive the coming reconstruction of society in which the values will have changed and character, not possession of wealth, title or birth, will be the test of merit.

The right for the right's sake is the motto which everyone should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet.

Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.

The test of your character is what it takes to stop you.

All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

Men are not to be judged by their looks, habits, and appearances; but by the character of their lives and conversations, and by their works.

There is no cramming for a test of character. It always comes as a pop quiz.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

When we lack integrity, we use power to control. When we lead with integrity, we use power to bless.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

Does truth have a moral?