#oral

The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves. ↗

— Leon Trotsky

#character #completely #conditions #customary #defined

I am convinced that our movement will be more demoralized and weakened by blind and uncritical admiration than by frank admission of past mistakes. ↗

— Marie Louise

#admission #am #blind #convinced #demoralized

It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America. ↗

— Jon Voight

#country #create #demoralize #election #gain

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies. ↗

— Rob Morrow

#fiction #i #learned #lot #morality

People who wouldn't dream of drowning a puppy in a barrel full of water think nothing of killing a fish the same slow way. ↗

— Karen Traviss

#moral #wess-har #dreams

In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#balance

The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush. ↗

— Yann Martel

#morality #life

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact. ↗

— Marlene Dietrich

#morality #obsession #prudishness #puritanism #sexuality

People today will have you believing life is a blank slate upon which you can write anything at all--this is poetic, even romantic. Unfortunately, it's also a lie, because life exists in, is bound by, shaped by, controlled by, and functions within a construct. Attempt to function outside that construct, or bend it to our will, or remove it completely, and you throw all of society into chaos. We're seeing that now. Like it or not, birds don't fly upside down...and neither can we. ↗

— Northern Adams

#construct #morality #psychology #life

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. ... The sensibilities of no two men are the same. Some would refuse to sell property without carefully explaining all about its merits and defects, and putting themselves in the purchasers' place and inquiring if he himself would buy under the circumstances. But such men never would be prosperous merchants. ↗

— Clarence Darrow

#honesty #idealistic #moral-clarity #success #successful