James Henry Breasted Quotes

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

Don't forget that you are the product of a culture that went stark raving mad about ten thousand years ago. Adjust your thinking accordingly.

Being in an area of the planet where scientists believe mankind started is quite amazing.

In human history, we are going from knowledge to omniscience, from potence to omnipotence, from ethics and religion to righteousness. So, in my view, God comes at the end of this long process. This may not happen in our lifetimes or even in the lifetime of our species.

If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn't show systematic change over human history. But they do.

Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.

We are not the same people that we have been, either in our social characteristics, in our patriotic sentiments, or in the tone of our moral and religious feelings.

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

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

For the first time in human history, there seems to be a radical increase in the proportion reaching principled morality.

Some of our earliest codes of ethics in the so-called Western World are little more than a rewriting of the Ten Commandments. Eastern legal constructions likewise arise out of the earliest spiritual traditions and understandings.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

By helping to raise man above the level of bestial vegetation, faith contributes in reality to the securing and safeguarding of his existence. Take away from present-day mankind its education-based, religious-dogmatic principles- or, practically speaking, ethical-moral principles- by abolishing this religious education, but without replacing it by an equivalent, and the result will be a grave shock to the foundations of their existence.

Man has made 32 million laws since THE COMMANDMENTS were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai more than three thousand years ago, but he has never improved on God's law. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS are the principles by which man may live with God and man may live with man. They are the expressions of the mind of God for His creatures. They are the charter and guide of human liberty, for there can be no liberty without the law.

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

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end.

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.

The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I'm not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.