Lawrence Kohlberg Quotes

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.

Ethics is a fluid term ...It's the standards by which a civilized society lives.

The national policy would be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.

The members of the Church, as members of society, have the same right and duty to promote the common good as do other citizens.

The right to private property is inconceivable without responsibilities to the common good.

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

All effective actions require the passport of morality.

For America, our interests are our values, and our values are our interests.

Respect for the rule of law is not optional; it's fundamental.

On this basic - being right and doing right the whole world can unite.

Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

In our society, authority derives from justice, and in our society, learning to live with authority should derive from and aid learning to understand and to feel justice.

There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

The burden of citizenship is accepting that what is neither your fault nor your responsibility may be your problem.

No leader will fight for values, for principles, if their government is a value-free vacuum. Moral relativism is morally wrong.

We're losing our way as a society. If we don't stand up, if we don't say what we think those rights should be, and if we don't protect them, we will very soon find out that we do not have them.

Democracy is based upon empathy and the recognition that some decisions are solely for the community's benefit without regard to one's own narrow self-interest.

When we act ignorant as a community, we are not doing the right thing.

I feel like it's actually everybody's responsibility to use whatever platform they have to do good in the world, basically, and to try to make our society better, whether you're an accountant or an activist or an athlete or whatever it is. I think it's everybody's responsibility.

We all have some basic obligation to one another.

Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.

Two basic values, autonomy and solidarity, serve as helpful prompters in any decision-making process.