#morality

The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern. ↗

— Herman E. Daly

#morality #selfishness #life

May we think of freedom not as the right to do as we please but as the opportunity to do what is right. ↗

— Peter Marshall

#freedom #inspirational #morality #united-states-of-america #freedom

Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#immorality #scepticism #sin #life

And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important... What sex should involve is a very serious relationship. Whether that relationship should or should not become a marriage is a question which depends on the circumstances and the context of the two persons' lives. I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives -- a question of which no man or woman can be automatically certain. When one is certain that one's choice is final, then marriage is, of course, a desirable state. But this does not mean that any relationship based on less than total certainty is improper. I think the question of an affair or a marriage depends on the knowledge and the position of the two persons involved and should be left up to them. Either is moral, provided only that both parties take the relationship seriously and that it is based on values. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#love #morality #partners #promiscuity #sex

Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#men

A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#morality #objective-truth #standards #men

We did an evil thing, father." "What do you think war is? We're men. Not boys swinging sticks at each other and pronouncing the evil wizard's defeat. We do what duty and honor demand, and often what we do is terrible. ↗

— Daniel Abraham

#morality #war #men

The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability. ↗

— David McCullough

#morality #technology #nature

Press conference [on the movie Carrington] yielded the usual crop of daftness. I've been asked if I related personally to Carrington's tortured relationship with sex and replied that no, not really, I'd had a very pleasant time since I was fifteen. This elicited very disapproving copy from the Brits ... No wonder people think we don't have sex in England. ↗

— Emma Thompson

#dora-carrington #expectations #identification #inhibitions #morality

Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly. ↗

— Robert W. Cox

#economics #god #monopoly #morality #religion