#oral

Is that the moral of it all, he thought? the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything? Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them? ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#moral #life

And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. “ The Prince, XVIII, 5 ↗

— Niccolò Machiavelli

#modern-stateman #morals #faith

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone. ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#promiscuity #sex #experience

True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen. ↗

— François de La Rochefoucauld

#moral #philosophy #reflections #love

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#love #morality #sympathy #love

The Leadership Training Institute of America trains and equips young men and women to be leaders with high standards of personal morality and integrity. ↗

— Michael Burgess

#equips #high #high standards #institute #integrity

In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt. ↗

— Timothy B. Tyson

#followers #hitler #humanity #impotence #love

We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty. ↗

— Frank Tallis

#morality #vanity #weakness #beauty

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for. ↗

— Sam Harris

#marriage

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