ethical questioning Quotes

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

Is there conscience in the Kremlin? Do they ever ask themselves what is the purpose of life? What is it all for?... No. Their creed is barren of conscience, immune to the promptings of good and evil.

Just because you’re taught that something’s right and everyone believes it’s right, it don’t make it right.

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima - and you know, is the price worth it?

Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

I don't remember Moses writing, 'Thou shalt not kill.. unless you think you have a good reason.

My interpretation is different. God asks Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" [Genesis 4:9] And Cain answers "Lo yadati, "I don't know" or "I didn't know." Then comes a period, followed by "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.

Always listen to the voice of your conscience. If your conscience conflicts with your faith, question everything.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did.

Any story that gets us thinking, and particularly young people, thinking why? Whether it's as a result of reading the book, or coming out of the theatre or the cinema, I think we should just simply be asking the question 'why'? Why did it happen to those people? Was it necessary? And anything that gets us thinking like that is really important.

If one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them.

The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.

I think people are starting to look away and questioning, and they're sort of horrified.

Even if there is a God, how do you know that his moral judgments are the correct ones? Seems to me Abraham should have said, 'God, that's just not right.'

One of the great things about the film being so unusual and provocative is the filmmaker to me doesn't seem to have a definite opinion on the rights or wrongs or the immorality of behaviors and systems, he just presents a set of very unusual circumstances and asked the audience to partake in the judging of what feels right or wrong or what feels natural and unnatural.

I felt like an impostor, taking all that money for reciting ten or twelve lines of nonsense a day.

Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.

The so-called godly man may be more likely to do serious wrong than a man who deeply questions himself. The 'godly man' often zealously follows religious precepts that, in the end, justify an unjust injury to others, while the questioning man, addressing his own conscience, may have the better chance to consider all the circumstances and come to the just decision.