"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

"7 DEADLY SINS

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality

Worship without sacrifice."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire

"Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not."
— Oprah Winfrey

"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
— Leo Tolstoy

"I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are."
— Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass)

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
— Aldous Huxley

"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."
— Oscar Wilde

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"Compassion is the basis of morality."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction."
— Orson Scott Card

"If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality."
— C. S. Lewis

"True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace."
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
— Albert Einstein

""The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles"

-- Mahatma Gandhi: Indian leader, 1869-1948"
— Mahatma Gandhi

"In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise."
— Sam Harris

"Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) "thou shalt not" predominates unduly over "thou shalt.""
— John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)

"If you want truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease."
— Sent-ts'an

"The higher the buildings, the lower the morals."
— Noel Coward

"We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)."
— Sam Harris

"...ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in twenty years, and that's that."
— John Champlin Gardner Jr.

"Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate, it is immutable."
— Patrick Henry

"It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Civil Disobedience)

"A man should always have these two rules in readiness. First, to do only what the reason of your ruling and legislating faculties suggest for the service of man. Second, to change your opinion whenever anyone at hand sets you right and unsettles you in an opinion, but this change of opinion should come only because you are persuaded that something is just or to the public advantage, not because it appears pleasant or increases your reputation."
— Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

"Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I’m willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy."
— Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)

"We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in."
— Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd)

"The obligation to endure gives us the right to know."
— Jean Rostand

"The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything"
— E.B. White

"The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as then social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved."
— José Saramago

"I don't think real morality can ever be codified. You can't say, Thou shalt not, and you can't say Thou shalt. What you can say is that this is how people feel and why they feel the way they do."
— John Gardner

"There was, I think, a prevailing
impression common to the provincial mind, that his misfortune was
the result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger."
— Bret Harte

"If you can't say anything good, you're probably at the Ice Capades. "
— Wheel of Morality

"Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men."
— Samuel Johnson, lexicographer(1709-1784)

"My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next."
— Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories)

"Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him. "
— Remy de Gourmont

"No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist."
— Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)