Moral Politics Quotes

The nation who has never admitted a chapter of morality into her political code,... will boldly avow that whatever power she can make hers is hers of right

I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.

I don't think politics has anything to do with left, right, or center. It has to do with trying to do right by people.

The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions.

I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.

Since politics fundamentally should be a moral enterprise, the church in this sense has something to say about politics.

Politics bereft of religion is absolute dirt, ever to be shunned.

Separation of church and state cannot mean an absolute separation between moral principles and political power.

The political is the moral and the moral is the political.

To inject morality into politics, is, I have said, and I repeat, the watchword of all our efforts.

Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.

There can be no fundamental distinction between what is morally right and what is politically right.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

We’re not here to bring politics to our morality, but to bring morality to our politics.

The situation that exists among nations in their relations to one another is such that it tempts even those who ordinarily come far short of cynicism to say that there is no connection between ethics and international relations.

You pick up very well-known books on Lincoln [and] you will find almost no reference to his long-term belief in colonization. Why? Because it doesn't fit the image of the Great Emancipator. It doesn't fit the retrospective view we want to have of Lincoln as the man who was the moralist in politics, who came into office committed to ending slavery and waited to sign this document.

All politics is an extension of ethics ... We cannot leave out conscience at the caucus room door.

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.

Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong.

We see political leaders replacing moral imperatives with a Southern strategy.

When President Clinton starts talking about what is moral, as he did when recommending a national law banning human cloning, it's time for us to lock up our daughters.

In American politics, there's a recurring fantasy, nurtured by the press, about 'courageous' politicians who do the right thing against their political interest. But really, isn't it even more encouraging when the right thing has just become good politics?

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion.

There is only one form of political strategy in which I have any confidence, and that is to try to do the right thing and sometimes be able to succeed.