Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

Do people get moral when they don't get ahead?

Every wicked man is in ignorance as to what he ought to do, and from what to abstain, and it is because of error such as this that men become unjust and, in a word, wicked.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

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

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

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.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

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

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government.

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.

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 sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.

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.

Different moralities must share some general features if they are to perform their functions of coordinating beings having particular kinds of motivations. Morality is a cultural construction in something like the way bridges are. There would be no bridges unless human beings used them to move across bodies of waters or depressions in the earth, but a good bridge cannot be designed according to whim, but rather according to what would adequately fulfill their function and the nature of the materials that are available for their construction.

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

Morality is either a social contract or you have to pay cash.