Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I've got confidence that most people in America still have a decent sense of manners, propriety, morality.

Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin.

Civilization depends on morality.

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.

Honesty is nothin' compared to decency.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

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

Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

Without Virtue there can be no liberty

"On my honor" - what an ennobling phrase! Three short words, nine letters, but the summation of all we call character. From the Boy Scout's Oath.

We all know that men and women can be good without faith. And we also know that faith is an incredibly important source of goodness in our country.

VIRTUES, n.pl. Certain abstentions.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

Ye must leave righteous ways behind, not to speak of unrighteous ways.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

Virtue and decency are so nearly related that it is difficult to separate them from each other but in our imagination.

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

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

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

Have you no morals, man?' 'Can't afford them,Governor.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.