Gary Bauer Quotes

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

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

Ethics are pre-determined and a matter of discovery, not a evolved concept.

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

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

We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

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

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government.

A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.

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

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.

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

We have found that morals are not, like bacon, to be cured by hanging; nor, like wine, to be improved by sea voyages; nor, like honey, to be preserved in cells.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

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

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

The thing I would most like to see invented is a way of teaching children and grown-ups the difference between right and wrong.

There is no system that is inherently moral if the participants themselves are not.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.