William Jennings Bryan Quotes

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.

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

We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

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

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

There is no right in acting.

For science, the end of the evolution struggle is simply represented by 'survival.' As for the means to that end, apparently anything goes. Darwinism leaves humanity without a moral compass.

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

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.

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

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

Conscience without judgment is superstition.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

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

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Conscience is known to be adequate in individuals; in large numbers little is to be expected of it.

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

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government.

Everything we do as teachers has moral overtones.

We shall take the Scopes case to the United States Supreme Court if necessary to establish that a teacher may tell the truth without being thrown in jail.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.