#morality

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. ↗

— Arthur C. Clarke

#greatest #hijacking #history #mankind #may

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves. ↗

— Grover Cleveland

#for the people #government #intelligence #interest #justice

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking. ↗

— Derek Jarman

#decision #law #lovemaking #morality #our

You can't legislate morality. ↗

— Jesse Ventura

#morality #you

I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality. ↗

— Donald Judd

#any #art #denial #general #i

Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose. ↗

— Donald Judd

#i #morality #suppose #want #well

It is almost impossible to imagine that any one could be so insensible to the high morality of Mr. Mill's character as to suggest to him any course of conduct that was not entirely upright and consistent. ↗

— Millicent Fawcett

#any #character #conduct #consistent #could

For us, universal values such as justice, morality and peace cannot be disputed and it is for this reason that we pursue the restoration of historical truth. ↗

— Robert Kocharian

#disputed #historical #historical truth #justice #morality

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

To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modem times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he—forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine 'love of one's enemies' is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture 'the enemy' as the man of ressentiment conceives him—and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived 'the evil enemy,' 'the Evil One,' and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a 'good one'—himself! ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#slave-morality #forgiveness