Emma Goldman Quotes

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

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

Morality in Europe today is herd-morality.

There are necessary taboos and essential decencies in every morally healthy society.

What goes on in the world and who's defining what is right or wrong in anything? Is there a place in any of our existence where we need judgment any longer? But we should have empathy towards each other and break away from those categories that politics and religion keep throwing back at us.

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

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

Modern morality is all about perception.

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.

Conventionality is not morality.

I have always maintained that society has no business dictating morality.

Conscience without judgment is superstition.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

Morality is a social necessity

To judge … any man … simply from his own point of view, is weak and illogical. History judges the man from its point of view. It condemns or applauds the point of view itself. The point of view of a malefactor is not to excuse robbery and murder. Nor is the spirit of the age to be pleaded in favor of the evil-doer.

There are, in every society, rules of conduct, and practices of life, which the progress of events has gradually marked out, and general observance hallowed. Of these, some are founded on the principles of morality and religion, some on caprice, some on prejudice. The breaking of any of them is always esteemed a crime against society.

Much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!

Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.