Quotations About Morality

What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command. ~Havelock Ellis


The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy. ~Goethe


Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. ~Graham Greene


Why should moral distinction be made between death by the spirochete and death by the streptococcus? ~Martin H. Fischer


What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. ~Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, 30 August 1941

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

Morality is a private and costly luxury. ~Henry B. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams


Without doubt half the ethical rules they din into our ears are designed to keep us at work. ~Llewelyn Powys


Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons. ~Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1875



The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach. ~Bertrand Russell