Charles Henry Parkhurst 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.

No human being or society ... ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal

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

It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

The four absolutes we all have in our minds: love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.

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.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

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.

Whenever one refuses to admit such a self-evident truth, for instance, as that it is wrong to steal, don't argue with him-search him; the reason may be found in his pocket.

Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action.

Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.

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

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

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.

Right and truth are greater than any power, and all power is limited by right.

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.

Integrity is the light that shines from a disciplined conscience.

No practice or tradition trumps the human rights that belong to all of us.

I don't care about what brand you are, I'm concerned what type of man you are, what your principles and standards are.

Principles are natural laws that are external to us and that ultimately control the consequences of our actions. Values are internal and subjective and represent that which we feel strongest about in guiding our behavior.