John Stuart Mill Quotes

The pulpit only "teaches" to be honest; the market-place "trains" to overreaching and fraud; and teaching has not a tithe of the efficiency of training. Christ never wrote a tract, but He went about doing good.

Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.

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

Without ethics, everything happens as if we were all five billion passengers on a big machinery and nobody is driving the machinery. And it's going faster and faster, but we don't know where.

Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.

As a lifelong student of the world’s wisdom literature, it is my duty to inform students that “ridding the world of evil” is a goal very different from any recommended by Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, though not so different from some recommended by the Josephs Stalin and McCarthy and by Mao Tse Tung.

If I should ever decide in the future to discuss my deep Christian beliefs and condemnation and sinfulness, I would use another forum besides Playboy.

Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.

Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.

Be sure, whatever you leave out, that you teach the children the three R’s,-Ruin, Redemption, and Regeneration.

I am raising my children with the Christian faith and life lessons I was taught. I am equipping them with all of the information and guidance as a parent and hope they will make sound decisions. The most important thing is to teach kids to stand firm in what they believe and not be swayed by detractors no matter what the subject matter.

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

Take those kids and raise them up, teach them how to drink out of a righteous cup.

The path of precept is long, that of example short and effectual.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity.

Sensibility appears to me to be neither good nor evil in itself, but in its application. Under the influence of Christian principle, it makes saints and martyrs; ill-directed, or uncontrolled, it is a snare, and the source of every temptation; besides, as people cannot get it if it is not given them, to descant on it seems to me as idle as to recommend people to have black eyes or fair complexions.

It deeply concerns me that somebody who knows little or nothing about the Christian faith would hear Mr. Trump call himself a Christian and then make a decision based on the Christian faith, based on his behavior.

Christ said "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" and when asked "who is thy neighbour? went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was understood by his hearers, you should substitute "Germans and Japanese" for Samaritan. I fear my modern day Christians would resent such a substitution, because it would compel them to realize how far they have departed from the teachings of the founder of their religion.

Something as important as marriage equality, which is now a constitutional right [in the USA], is something that cannot be denied. It's also very un-Christian, if you think about the way Christ was and Christ's teachings. This is not loving. This is anger. This is hatred. This is bigotry. And it's wrong.

These days - with the decline of the traditional churches - I'm concerned about where we obtain some form of moral direction.