Vance Havner Quotes

I fear … that morals do not of necessity advance hand in hand with the sciences.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

A great gulf, however, has been opened between man's material advance and his social and moral progress, a gulf in which he may one day be lost if it is not closed or narrowed.

I've always believed in people's capacity for goodness. I still believe that people are good. What I'm not so trusting about anymore is their relationship to their own goodness.

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

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.

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

A pure heart won't get us out of conflict and controversy. It may well be the very thing that gets us into it.

I marveled at them both; how difficult it must be to be a person. To constantly subvert your desires. To worry about doing the right thing, rather than doing what is most expedient. At that moment, honestly, I had grave doubts as to my ability to interact on such a level. I wondered if I could ever become the human I hoped to be.

In science the new is an advance; but in morals, as contradicting our inner ideals and historic idols, it is ever a retrogression.

In the heart of man, there is a constant conflict between the flesh and the spirit.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

Man's sense of Morality tends to decrease as his Power increases

We are so presumptuous that we think we can separate our personal interest from that of humanity, and slander mankind without compromising ourselves.

Honor must start in the heart, but if it ends there, it isn’t honor. Honor must be expressed through words, symbols, actions, or gestures. Honor is among the most incarnational of the virtues. It must have feet and hands.

The march of intellect is proceeding at quick time; and if its progress be not accompanied by a corresponding improvement in morals and religion, the faster it proceeds, with the more violence will you be hurried down the road to ruin.

If a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit.

Tis well when we dare not do a thing we think is not good and fair; but not so well when we think a thing not good and fair because we dare not do it.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

Man's Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,that tho' she guide his highest flight heav'nward, and teach himdignity morals manners and human comfort,she can delicatly and dangerously bedizenthe rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell.

Alas,we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

Every person professes to love good and hate evil, but in his actions his real preferences emerges.