Denis Diderot Quotes

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

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

You can't legislate morality.

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

Modern morality is all about perception.

I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Humans are the only ones who are the custodians of other people's morals.

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.

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

Fear is the mother of morality.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

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

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.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

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

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

Morality is the weakness of the brain.

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

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

Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, 'morality.' Morality is the 'idea' of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an 'intellectual' man, a so-called independent, a 'freethinker.'

We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.

Guided by nothing but pop culture values, many children no longer learn how to think about morality and virtue, or to think of them at all. They grow up with no shared moral framework, believing that the highest values are diversity, tolerance and non-judgmentalism.