Moral Perspective Quotes

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.

We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself - he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.

Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'

The fall of man stands a lie before Beethoven, a truth before Hitler.

I don't think 'Profit' is devoid of morality. He's just on a different plane than the rest of us.

Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.

Suicide, is a persons privilege. I don't believe it's a sin or a crime it's your right if you do. Though it doesn't get you anywhere.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

We will only begin to forgive when we can look upon the wrongdoers as ourselves, neither better nor worse. We need to remember that we coexist as mortals in the world, together, the wronged and the wrongdoer, and that, in our common humanity, the situation could readily be reversed.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

The body is an actor's tool, like the face, malleable. I never thought that being naked was immoral or outrageous.

Things and persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. How unconsciously we judge others by the light that is within ourselves, condemning or approving them by our own conception of right and wrong, honor and dishonor! We show by our judgment just what the light within us is.

Irreverence is another person's disrespect to your god; there isn't any word that tells what your disrespect to his god is.

As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.

Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.

I just don’t see how anyone can be so cold. (Kiara) And you should be grateful, little girl, to whatever god you worship, that you can say that. In the world we come from, I don’t understand how anyone can be anything but cold. (Syn)

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

I don't personally have a sense that life starts at conception. I don't personally have that sense.

The body of a dead enemy always smells sweet.

I said to one young activist who herself was the daughter of an undocumented worker, and so could speak from a very personal and legitimate perspective - I remember saying to her: I agree with you, from a moral perspective, that a child from Honduras is worth the same as my daughter. God is not a respecter of boundaries; he's not saying that American kids deserve a better life than Honduran kids. But I'm the president of the United States, and the nation-state by definition means that boundaries mean something and borders mean something.

There is no such thing as evil. Only relative degrees of good.

Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.

[Describing the Indians] It is true, he doth not discover what is called English Courage, of standing undaunted in open Field to be shot at; he rather chooses to be safe in his own Person, whilst he destroys the Person of his Enemy; but this is all, the Custom of Particular Nations. If you incline to put him to Death in a painful Manner, he will convince You, that he can undergo the most excruciating Torture, without a Groan. This perhaps would be called, by a civilized European, a Savage Temper. The Definition of Courage is arbitrary. As to taking the Scalp off a dead Man, it Will not give any great Pain; & this is the Trophy of their Victory, which they return Home with as their Voucher; & as to any Damage it may do to a dead Person, it is of no more Consequence than taking off the Shirt of his Garment.