Gouverneur Morris Quotes

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

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

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.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

Right and wrong as moral principles do not change. They are applicable and reliable determinants whether the situations with which we deal are simple or complicated. There is always a right and wrong to every question which requires our solution.

In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.

A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.

As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality.

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

If it be true, as I believe it is, that morality is dependent upon religion, then religion is not only the most practical thing in the world, but the first essential.

Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin.

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

I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

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

We have found that morals are not, like bacon, to be cured by hanging; nor, like wine, to be improved by sea voyages; nor, like honey, to be preserved in cells.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Ethics are more important than laws.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.