Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

A man may not transgress the bounds of major morals, but may make errors in minor morals.

A cowardly act! What do I care about that? You may be sure that I should never fear to commit one if it were to my advantage.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.

I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.

Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

A person may be qualified to do greater good to mankind and become more beneficial to the world, by morality without faith than by faith without morality.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.

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.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

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

Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.

Integrity, a standard of personal morality and ethics, is not relative to the situation you happen to find yourself in and doesn't sell out to expediency. Its short supply is getting shorter - but without it, leadership is a facade.

Is it less dishonest to do what is wrong because it is not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy.

The propensity to avoid moral considerations was producing not simply a politically illiterate and authoritarian society, but one that was increasingly saturated in violence and a culture of cruelty. Needless to say, all of these forces intensified the increasing militarization and corporatization of higher education, along with the privatizing of everyday life.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

Reading about ethics is about as likely to improve one's behavior as reading about sports is to make one into an athlete.