Morality Quotes

“Love your neighbor. Love the stranger. Hear the cry of the otherwise unheard. Liberate the poor from their poverty. Care for the dignity of all. Let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it is done by and whoever it is done against. And do these things because, being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity, whatever our color or culture, class or creed. These are moral principles, not economic or political ones. They have to do with conscience, not wealth or power. But without them, freedom will not survive. The free market and liberal democratic state together will not save liberty, because liberty can never be built by self-interest alone. I-based societies all eventually die. Ibn Khaldun showed this in the fourteenth century, Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth, and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth. Other-based societies survive. Morality is not an option. It’s an essential.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“A 2017 summary of the study concluded: ‘Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.’29”
― Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“I realised that health is not a matter of never being ill. It is the ability to recover.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“When everything is available, every lifestyle on offer, when all you have is freedom, but nothing to guide you in that freedom, “it’s not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life, you have trouble even staying focused on the question.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“It is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“The French psychologist Jacques Lacan argued that the sense of an ‘I’ closely corresponded to the mass manufacture of glass mirrors.3 All roads in the late seventeenth century, writes historian Christopher Hill, led to individualism: ‘More rooms in better-off houses, use of glass in windows . . . replacement of benches by chairs –”
― Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“From monogamy the rich and powerful lose and the poor and powerless gain.”
― Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“That is why the market and the state, the fields of economics and politics are arenas of competition, while morality is the arena of cooperation. A society with only competition and very limited cooperation will be abrasive and ruthless, with glittering prizes for the winners and no consolation for the losers.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“Life expectancy in the UK in 1900 was forty-seven years for men, fifty for women, and in 2017, seventy-nine years for men and eighty-three for women, an increase of between two and three extra years in every decade. We are, quite simply, better off, better-informed, healthier and freer than any previous generation.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times