Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

We need to provide an education which teaches crit­ical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

It is the business of the teacher ... to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.

An education which does not teach us to discriminate between good and bad, to assimilate the one and eschew the other, is a misnomer

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

There is a danger when we give young people only a catalog of dos and don'ts. In these young minds, the gospel is not intellectually credible.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

An educated person must learn to act justly, beginning, first of all, with his thoughts, then later in his deeds. That is what it means to be educated.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting

This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

Education is the art of making man ethical.

Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils.

Force cannot transmit a moral principle: moral ideas can be received only through the reason of the heart.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.

In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

You might want to think twice before you try to use a man's conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn't have one.