Edwin Markham Quotes

My parents are naive in their morality of things, and so, without realising it, I landed up being ethical and having strong opinions.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

Modern morality is all about perception.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Fear is the mother of morality.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

If you want young people to take right and wrong seriously, you must put them in the presence of people who take right and wrong seriously.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

One needs to know what is right and what is wrong.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means they need to sit down with some real people.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.

You can't legislate morality.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.