#moral

Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone. ↗

— Caitlín R. Kiernan

#morality #pragmitism #men

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return. ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#honor #morality #sacrifice #survival #war

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing. ↗

— William Lane Craig

#bible #canaanites #god #immorality #israel

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#decisions #ethics #law #love #morals

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables? ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#morals #parables #stories #humor

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he exposed the world to a momentous discovery . For the first time in history, human beings were seen not as creatures of divine origin, but instead, as a product of nature, an animal like every other on the planet. Imagine yourself back in that amazing year. The day before Darwin’s book was published, you wake up thinking yourself the image of God; the next morning you realize you have the face of a monkey. Not everybody immediately embraced this rude demotion from god to goat. ↗

— Jeff Schweitzer

#morality #religion #imagination

So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being?" ~R. Alan Woods [2012] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#justice-without-mercy #law #morality #r-alan-woods #death

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#christianity #ethics #morality #philosophy #spirituality

That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#philosophical #virtue #love

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#morals #self-improvement #inspirational