Robert Bolt Quotes

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

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

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is reallyworrisome.

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.

Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

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

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

Morality, thou deadly bane, Thy tens o' thousands thou hast slain! Vain is his hope, whose stay an' trust is In moral mercy, truth, and justice!

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.