Neil Kurshan Quotes

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

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

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.

For children to take morality seriously they must be in the presence of adults who take morality seriously. And with their own eyes they must see adults take morality seriously.

If you want young people to take right and wrong seriously, you must put them in the presence of people who take right and wrong seriously.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

The thing I would most like to see invented is a way of teaching children and grown-ups the difference between right and wrong.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

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.

The conscience of children is formed by the influences that surround them; their notions of good and evil are the result of the moral atmosphere they breathe.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

We should reserve the notion of 'morality' for the ways in which we can affect one another's experience for better or worse. Some people use the term 'morality' differently, of course, but I think we have a scientific responsibility to focus the conversation so as to make it most useful.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

No one is born evil; it's just the choices that they make.

I'd like to write a series that, in an adventurous and fun way, teaches kids a way to discern between good and evil, to establish a foundation on moral absolutes.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.

Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.