Moral Evolution Quotes

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

… moral ideas are not fixed. The attitude of public opinion towards slavery was completely changed in twenty or thirty years.

Ethics change with technology.

In those days, slavery was not looked upon, even in Quaker Philadelphia, with the shudder and abhorrence one feels towards it now.

We started off with physical evolution and got our form. Then we somehow developed language, which meant cultural evolution could race so we could change our behavior really quickly instead of over hundreds and hundreds of years. And then comes moral evolution, which means we're not frightfully far along with people. And maybe we end up with a spiritual evolution, which is this connectedness with the rest of the life forms on the planet.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

Ethics evolve naturally, and we trample upon them with laws created by reason and experience.

Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.

Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!

In my day we let the wolfswans incapable of birthing our young die. (Markus) Then it’s a good thing we’re in the twenty-first century and not the Dark Ages, isn’t it? (Fang)

He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

Therefore let us repent and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God.

The ideas of right and wrong change with the experience of the race, and this change is wrought by the gradual ascertaining of consequences - of results.

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best ... Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god... Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? ... Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves?

I used to be very revenge-motivated, but that's just because I'm a Scorpio. Now I'm more so, like, practice honesty just because it makes you feel better.

The greatest need in the world at this moment is the transformation of human nature.

No man becomes bad all at once.

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.