Moral Certainty Quotes

I don't apologize for my behavior anymore. Whatever I do or don't do shouldn't matter. Moral certainty is dangerous. Moral certainty is what makes people go to war unnecessarily and illegally. Morality, as any halfway intelligent human being would tell you, is a very subjective thing.

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

The temptation is for us to share our own opinions, our own thoughts and to speak from the whole realm of possibility. We can't do that as pastors. We need to have a strong voice of conviction, and the way we can do that is through Scripture.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

In that disputable point of persecuting men for conscience sake, I see such dreadful consequences rising, I would be as fully convinced of the truth of it, as a mathematical demonstration, before I would venture to act upon it or make it a part of my religion.

I grew up feeling from a very young age that what was right was right, no matter if God or my teacher said so.

After the conflict had once begun, the vast majority of people involved, high and low, were convinced, as most of them still are, of the essential righteousness of their cause. This was not altered by the fact that four of the states bargained hard and long with both parties before casting in their lot with either. When they did act, they were as sure as anyone else that they were animated by the highest principles.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

The unfathomable isn’t something our media masters can tolerate. An unsurpassing self-assurance in their own moral and intellectual wisdom isn’t allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So to maintain the patina of omniscience they must fit the story into one of their narratives.

Sentiment never was and never can be a guarantee for justice.

Truth is not half way between right and wrong;

Judgment is easy: it is black and white, as brutal as a gavel strike.

... moral certainty is certainty which is sufficient to regulate our behaviour, or which measures up to the certainty we have on matters relating to the conduct of life which we never normally doubt, though we know that it is possible, absolutely speaking, that they may be false.

If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven.

North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.

I would say that without any doubt he's the killer - the law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty which I - there's no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.

I liked the clear morality of 1941, when you had no doubt about good and evil. There was a lot of idealism, people fighting for a cause. People are searching for morality today.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.

In sorting out my feelings and beliefs, there is, however, one piece of moral ground of which I am absolutely certain: if I were to be murdered I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged. Especially by government--which can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.

This is not the most right I've ever been.

It’s not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.

you must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.

Whenever a man is known to seek promotion by intrigue, by temporizing, or by resorting to the haunts of vulgarity and vice for support, it may be inferred, with moral certainty, that he is not a man of real respectability, nor is he entitled to public confidence.

Virtue does not truly reward her votary if she leaves him sad and half doubtful whether it would not have been better to serve vice.