Rachel Cusk Quotes

Fear is the mother of morality.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

You can't legislate morality.

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

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

The foundations of morality are like all other foundations: If you dig too much about them, the superstructure will come tumbling down.

Morality is a social necessity

Our moral philosophy determines our values - what we care about and what we don't care about - and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives.

One needs to know what is right and what is wrong.

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

I'm not any more moral than my neighbors.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means they need to sit down with some real people.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

When we talk about self-confrontations, we are speaking about moral issues rather than social issues.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is that which we perceive as a value.