Woodrow Wilson Quotes

I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

In any society that is governed by the rule of law, some form of morality is always imposed. It's inescapable.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

Since the state is a community of human beings it is as truly subject to the moral law as any private society.

Ye shall not do ... every man what is right in his own eyes.

It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.

Morality is a social necessity

Americans use custom, more than written law, to enforce virtue

The general right of the whole decides what is good and what is evil

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Law has always served the purpose of condensing and defining the moral wishes and expectations of the community.

Morality is not merely different in different communities. Its level is not the same for all the component groups within the same community.

In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.

Society's mores have changed, and what used to be thought not to be cruel and unusual now is thought to be cruel and unusual.

Opinion has ever been stronger than law.

The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.

If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know of no principle which can stay its hand.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

The conceptions which any nation or individual entertains of the God of its popular worship may be inferred from their own actions and opinions, which are the subjects of their approbation among their fellow-men.