Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

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

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

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

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

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.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

You know, there's a right and wrong way to do everything.

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

Morality, thou deadly bane,Thy tens o' thousands thou has slain!

Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define the "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival".

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

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