Moral System Quotes

When we assume God to be a guiding principle well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.

The moral foundations of a society do not extend only to its political system; they must extend to its economic system as well. America's commitment to capitalism is unquestionably the best example of this principle. Capitalism is not, contrary to what those on the left have tried to argue, an amoral system based on selfishness, greed, and exploitation. It is a moral system based on a biblical ethic. There is no other comparable system that has raised the standard of living of millions of people, created vast new wealth and resources, or inspired so many beneficial innovations and technologies. The wonderful thing about capitalism is that it does not discriminate against the poor, as so often has been charged; indeed, it is the only economic system that raises the poor out of poverty. Capitalism also allows nations that are not rich in natural resources to prosper.

The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.

There is no system that is inherently moral if the participants themselves are not.

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.

Even if we Moslems believe that we have been the victims of crimes, we should not commit crimes in retaliation. It makes a mockery of our ethical and moral system.

We're still expecting capitalism to solve problems: 'Maybe if we sell enough oil, we can give some profits to an environmental agency!' Capitalism isn't a moral system.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

[Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return] is what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every other system, don't forget, these moments are viewed as means: Every moral system proclaims that "each moment of life ought to be motivated." Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends.

The moral and religious system which Jesus Christ transmitted to us is the best the world has ever seen, or can see.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

His system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers... He was the most innocent, the most benevolent, the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

For one, as I've written before, the death penalty is plainly unjust. When the number of wrongful convictions and death penalty cases that are eventually exonerated number in the hundreds, if not thousands, we can not call it a moral system.

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there.

The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.

All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

That the system of morals propounded in the New Testament contained no maxim which had not been previously enunciated, and that some of the most beautiful passages in the apostolic writings are quotations from Pagan authors, is well known to every scholar... To assert that Christianity communicated to man moral truths previously unknown, argues on the part of the asserted either gross ignorance or wilful fraud.

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

I've had the philosophy that John Adams expressed, in the kind of system that we're trying to create in this country: that this is a system for moral people. It will work for no other.

It is certain that the soul is either mortal or immortal. The decision of this question must make a total difference in the principles of morals. Yet philosophers have arranged their moral system entirely independent of this. What an extraordinary blindness!