#immorality

When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country. ↗

— Noah Webster

#citizen #country #gives #his #immorality

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#forgiveness #immorality #redemption #religion #responsibility

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world. ↗

— Malcolm Bradbury

#english #i #immorality #like #most

Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet. ↗

— Judith Martin

#enforce #force #immorality #morality

Once is a man's life, for one mortal moment, he must make a grab for immorality; if not, he has not lived. ↗

— Sylvester Stallone

#immorality #life #lived #make #man

It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#amorality #corruption #cynicism #growing-old #hopelessness

But the point is this Monsieur...the reason why Madame complains of you is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious. ↗

— Daphne du Maurier

#immorality #music #art

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike. ↗

— Alfred North Whitehead

#dislike #given #happen #immorality #like

Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create. ↗

— David McCallum

#conformity #create #creative #creative energy #drain

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#immorality #attitude