Ravi Zacharias Quotes

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult ethical controversies of the day.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

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

There’s more time spent on teaching kids about recycling than on character development in the American schools.

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

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

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

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

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.

The teacher who would be true to his mission and accomplish the most good, must give prominence to moral as well as intellectual instruction.

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

Although children are good and well born, vice will blight them if they are not well educated.

There's a voice inside children that knows right from wrong. I call it listening to your inner Jiminy Cricket. I tell my daughter, 'If you're thinking this is not the best idea, it probably isn't.'

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

There are two methods of human activity - and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people: One use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn't do was bad.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.