Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

Have you no morals, man?' 'Can't afford them,Governor.

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

The very essence of our civilization is that we give a paramount place to morality in all our affairs, public or private.

All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Goodness means the highest degree of popularity.

If we don't believe in moral absolutes and then we get into a cultural-political debate, how are we going to win?

Morality is a social necessity

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution, or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.