#morality

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules ↗

— Albert Camus

#morality #ethics

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#morality #scandal #gossip

Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger. ↗

— Glen Cook

#morality #cooking

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

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own ↗

— Rollo May

#existentialism #morality #existentialism

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#good #good-and-evil #humor #morality #humor

When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice? ↗

— Alan Moore

#fiction #morality #pulp-fiction #love

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better. ↗

— Mark Twain

#morality #business

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The horror! ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#morality #struggle #the-horror #change