Moral Intent Quotes

God does not care what good you did, but why you did it. He does not grade the fruit but probes the core and tests the root.

You forgive yourself for every failure because you are trying to do the right thing. God knows that and you know it. Nobody else may know it.

Not always actions show the man; we find who does a kindness is not therefore kind.

Hale is what he is in the American pantheon not because of what he did, but because of why he did it.

The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law.

In the continuing debate over the morality of enhanced interrogation, an essential consideration is often overlooked: intent.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?

The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. If I fling half a crown to a beggar with intention to break his head and he picks it up and buy victuals with it, the physical effect is good. But with respect to me the action is very wrong.

There has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the power and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what is the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their power, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and find all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.

There is a spiritual godliness that drifts naturally through the affairs of man, but it is visible only if actions are undertaken and performed with that godliness in mind.

My question is, do you believe in an evil possessed of its own purity? or does every act intend some good?

It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the Public Good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend they always reason right about the means of promoting it.

The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.