Amoral Quotes

Human nature is governed by general self-interest and affected by genetic predisposition, which implies that there are likely to be limits to our moral sensitivities. ~ Nayef Al-Rodhan

Since religion has proved itself uniquely delinquent on the one subject where moral and ethical authority might be counted as universal and absolute, I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is - because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs - not just amoral but immoral. ~ Christopher Hitchens

In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage - an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The ~ Salman Rushdie

There's too many people that paint with a broad brush that we're all corrupt, we're all amoral. ... And having these kinds of things happen, whether it's a Republican or Democratic senator - we certainly have had plenty of Democratic scandals in the past - we need people who are in office who will hold themselves to a little higher standard. ~ John Ensign

Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one's own navel, to turn up one's eyes and humbly offer the back of one's neck to Gletkin's revolver - that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is ananachronism; and every compromise with one's own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. ..." He felt for the bottle behind him and poured out an other glass. Rubashov noticed that the bottle was already half empty. You also could do with a little solace, he thought.

"The greatest criminals in history," Ivanov went on, "are not of the type Nero and Fouché, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy. Gandhi's inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one's own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave every ~ Arthur Koestler

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence
but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson
that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them. ~ Naomi Wolf

Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy. ~ Darrell Drake

For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment ... Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society). ~ Merold Westphal

No, that's not the style of these people,' explained Maxy. 'You shouldn't think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin's court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed. ~ Lily King

... but I don't think I'm the only person who is tired of books and movies full of paper-doll characters you don't care about, who have no self-respect and no respect for anybody or any institution ... ..And I don't want to sound preachy or Victorian, but I'm tired of amorality in fiction and in real life. Immorality is a fascinating human dilemma that creates suspense for the readers and tension for the characters, but where is the tension in an amoral situation? When people have no personal code, nothing is threatening and nothing is meaningful. ~ Olive Ann Burns

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. ~ Zadie Smith

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones. ~ Irving Stone

On the playground, "cooties" seems harmless and innocuous (unless you've been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is "the demonization of the 'Other' in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants." These deviants are considered to be "deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness." Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating "monsters" who are threatening to society. ~ Richard Beck

Investors are people with more money than time.
Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.
Startups are business experiments performed with other people's money.
Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it."
"Company culture is what goes without saying.
There are no real rules, only laws.
Success forgives all sins.
People who leak to you, leak about you.
Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.
Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.
Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.
Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.
Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player - investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer - is complicit. ~ Antonio García Martínez

Finally, I'd say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don't be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I'm at work I'm highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what's more, they're completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, 'Of course, and this is the way my imagination works. ~ Philip Pullman

Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Why is your HOW message today more timely than ever?
All progress now depends on How. We have entered the Era of Behavior. Of course our behavior has always mattered, but in today's world, it matters more than ever and in ways it never has before. We live in a more connected and interdependent world. Yet we tend to speak about the world in amoral terms. The single most profound implication of an increasingly interconnected world is that it has rendered us ethically, if not morally, interdependent. ~ Dov Seidman

Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral. ~ Richard Stallman

Many today insist that music is amoral, that there is nothing innately good or bad about music itself. They say it is neutral, and only its use determines whether it is good or evil. To a degree this is true, but in a very real way music ceases to be neutral the moment those little black-and-white notes begin to be woven together to produce a certain combinations of sounds that result in the message or world-view that the composer of the music wants to get across. The music itself becomes a statement, even when words are not attached to its message. ~ Ron Owens

The press has let the country down. It's taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that. I think that Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power. ~ Bruce Springsteen

We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent. ~ Richard M. Weaver

We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions ... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life ... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art. ~ Asger Jorn

Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do not have higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins. They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored, even the few who become rich and powerful. ~ Martha Stout

Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly. ~ James Surowiecki

What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise. ~ Samantha Power

The right place; that was what he was looking for. The right place. Place was all important, place meant everything. Take this rock…
"Take you, rock," he said. He squinted at it.
Ah yes, here we have the nasty big flat rock, sitting doing nothing, just amoral and dull, and it sits like an island in the polluted pool. The pool is a tiny lake on the little island, and the island is in a drowned crater. The crater is a volcanic crater, the volcano forms part of an island in a big inland sea. The inland sea is like a giant lake on a continent and the continent is like an island sitting in the seas of the planet. The planet is like an island on the sea of space within its system, and the system floats within the cluster, which is like an island in the sea of the galaxy, which is like an island in the archipelago of of its local group, which is an island within the universe; the universe is like an island floating in a sea of space in the Continua, and they float like islands in the Reality, and…
But down through the Continua, the Universe, the Local Group, the Galaxy, the Cluster, the System, the Planet, the Continent, the Island, the Lake, the Island… the rock remained. AND THAT MEANT THE ROCK, THE CRAPPY AWFUL ROCK HERE WAS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, THE CONTINUA, THE WHOLE REALITY! ~ Iain M. Banks

Fats was starting to think that if you flipped every bit of received wisdom on its head you would have the truth. He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptised backwards into ignorance and simplicity. ~ J.K. Rowling

For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral
and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The cause of the attack was not American foreign policy but an amoral disregard for human life.It is grotesque to suggest that a four-year-old girl, making her first and only flight in an aeroplane, should somehow bear responsibility for the actions of a government for whom she was never allowed the chance to grow up and vote either for or against. ~ Menzies Campbell

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab's quest for the whale may be mad and "monomaniacal," as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a "dumb brute," as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront.
The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a "Prometheus" with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral ("vortex") of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab's crew: "The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world." But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little ~ Northrop Frye

I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

By every mortal standard, the worst faeries in the world were those in the Dark Court. They fed on the baser emotions; they engaged in activities that the other-also amoral-faery courts repudiated. They were also the only ones she truly trusted or understood. ~ Melissa Marr

All too many churchmen view the undisciplined & amoral products of statist education as evidences of the failure of these schools. On the contrary, they are evidences of their success. ~ Rousas John Rushdoony

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are. ~ Douglas Coupland

[A]s moral philosophers through the ages have pointed out, a philosophy of living based on "Not everyone, just me!" falls apart as soon as one sees oneself from an objective standpoint as a person just like others. It is like insisting that "here," the point in space one happens to be occupying at the moment, is a special place in the universe. ~ Steven Pinker

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Perversion is used only to overcome moral prejudices or conformity; the mind and desire must become amoral, focused and made entirely acceptive so that the life-force is free of inhibitions prior to the control. Thus, the Sabbath becomes a deliberate sex-orgy for the purpose of materialization: the Great Reality of 'as if (wishful thinking). Sex is fully exploited: he who injures none, himself does not injure. ~ Anonymous

I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God. ~ Wendy Kaminer

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man. ~ James Comey

This is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears, like the first centuries of the Christian era, it's an age of extreme solutions. ~ Iris Murdoch

The real and, to me, inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 per cent efficient mechanical man - superbly free-floating, unemotional, and unrelated to anything. This is the authoritarian dream, a population of zombies, free to be manipulated by the great brains of the founder, the leader of the inner manipulative clique. ~ Janet Reitman

Denying the existence of God leads us to preposterous conclusions so that, in the end, the amoral world of the skeptic who simply cannot explain good is worse than the world of the theist who has an explanation for evil. ~ Ravi Zacharias

Someone who's amoral and selfish can be a threat to you, but they're also a threat to everyone else, and that tends to limit how much time they can spend on you personally. But someone who believes in what he's doing can convince other people that opposing you is the right thing to do. In the long run, that's a lot more dangerous. ~ Benedict Jacka

In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once. ~ Anonymous

The mark of the "Noble Minded Man" is that he does not do things simply because they are pleasing or profitable to himself, but because they flow from an unconditional moral imperative. They are things that he sees to be right and good in themselves. Hence, anyone who is guided by the profit motive, even though it be for the profit of the society to which he belongs, is not capable of living a genuinely moral life. Even when his acts do not conflict with the moral law, they remain amoral because they are motivated by the desire of profit and not for the love of good. ~ Thomas Merton

Kids can sniff out when they are being preached to, and they don't like it. So while my books aren't amoral, they are not infused with morals or a message, either, and kids like that. ~ Jeff Kinney

I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's ... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes. ~ David Mitchell

Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil. Power is a game - this cannot be repeated too often - and in games you do not judge your opponents by their intentions but by the effect of their actions. ~ Robert Greene

Evolution is amoral. Just because something is natural doesn't make it morally good ("the naturalistic fallacy"). Conversely, just because something is morally desirable doesn't make it true ("the moralistic fallacy"). ~ John Durant

Sometimes it is very useful to have a reputation for being a reclusive, amoral jerk. ~ Brandon Sanderson

It will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and, after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive accepter of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. ~ George Orwell

the seedy-garish world of back-street London... restless rootless... beautiful, amoral, modern siren of doom in a jungle of dance halls, caffs and pubs. ~ Mark McShane

Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society. ~ Charley Reese

Ah. Well, it stands for Freedom From Morality. We don't think healthy amorality happens naturally."
"But you're not amoral," I pointed out. I would trust you to keep your word any time. You don't steal. I've never known you to harm anyone except enemy soldiers in time of war."
He laughed. "I didn't say 'immoral', I said amoral. You really didn't read your guidebook. A person who has a compulsive need to break moral commandments is as much a prisoner as the person who feels bound to obey them. And the human brain is hardwired to produce moral commandments. That is why we think you have to train young people to keep them from developing morality and blocking their pursuit of pleasure. I teach it because --"
"It gives you an outlet for your sadistic urge to confuse children. ~ John Barnes

The progressive movement needs more crazy and amoral/immoral right-wing politicians and pundits like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. ~ Moby

It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Power-over is amoral. Power-to is responsibility. ~ Gloria Feldt

A world without God to give people faith that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America, and it is a world governed by the amoral United Nations, where mass murderers sit on "human rights" councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything, and the individual is reduced to the status of a well-fed serf. Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. What we fear is transforming that which is already good. The moral record of humanity does not fill us with optimism about "fundamentally transforming" something as rare as America. Evil is normal. America is not. ~ Dennis Prager

As President, I will end once and for all the use of taxpayer funds to promote the National Endowment for the Arts and other programs that subsidize amoral and degrading activities. ~ Gary Bauer

Adults use children in order to survive because now, we have this [kids] tissue that can allow us to live longer. And once you've accepted this idea that you can use this tissue to make yourself healthier, what's to stop you from making it into a nutritional supplement? What's to stop you from any kind of weird, bizarre, amoral act because you've already made the leap? ~ Greg Gutfeld

The inevitability of abortion. But I refuse to accept the amoral consequences that are even far worse than that, which is harvesting them because we decided that as an adult society, we can use children to make our lives better, if you seek the reverse. ~ Greg Gutfeld

The tiger's world, by contrast, is not only amoral but peculiarly consequence-free, and this-the atavistic certainty that there is nothing more lethal than itself-is the apex predator's greatest weakness ~ John Vaillant

He doth, indeed, especially love heavy-metal; into the recording sessions whereof he does, indeed, sneak, that he may insert backward messages into songs; for he believeth retrograde gibberish laid inaudibly under ear-shattering grindcore, to be the most effective way to promote his views. 19 And he doth, indeed, visit people in their time of need; and offer to grant them mortal happiness in exchange for their immortal soul; and if they agree, he doth, indeed, have them sign a contract; for though he is the amoral Prince of All Lies, he hath for some reason an unshakable respect for tort law. ~ David Javerbaum

There are, indeed, several ways in which religion is not just amoral, but positively immoral. And these faults and crimes are not be found in the behavior of its adherents (which can sometimes be exemplary) but in its original precepts. These include:

1.) Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous.
2.) The doctrine of blood sacrifice.
3.) The doctrine of atonement.
4.) The doctrine of eternal reward and / or punishment.
5.) The imposition of impossible tasks and rules. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I hadn't seen Reth since he had come to visit me in the hospital after I released the souls, and I never wanted to again.Him or any of the other creepy, manipulative, amoral, psychotic, insert-furhter-negative-adjectives-of-your-choice-here faeries. Especially after today, if the sylph was with them. I wasn't about to draw their attention to me by holding hands through the Faerie Paths.
She smiled. "I understand. In fact, one of my first initiatives was weaning IPCA from faerie magic dependancy. I think you'll be pleased to find that we now use them a mere forty percent of the amount we used to."
"Forty percent, huh? That's still about one hundred percent more than I'm happy with. ~ Kiersten White

A spy novel?" Dagmar asked. "You two are talking about a spy novel?"
Annwyl threw her hands up in the air. "Not just a spy novel!"
"It's much more than that," Ragnar argued, and when Dagmar gawked at him in disgust, he added, "I can't read deep, meaningful, thought-provoking philosophy all the time."
"Exactly. Sometimes you have to read about a completely amoral hero whoring and killing his way across an unnamed land in the name of the queen that he'll always love - "
" - but never have." Then both Ragnar and Annwyl sighed a little. ~ G.A. Aiken

The English language is direct, unapologetic, and wonderfully amoral. Italian has a beautiful sound, but you cannot help but feel that you are always dealing with ghosts from the past and the looming dark presence of the Vatican. ~ Chiara Barzini

Individuals are concerned not
with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with
the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that
these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is
largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we
do not have a moral concern in these moral matters. As
performers we are merchants of morality. Our day is given
over to intimate contact with the goods we display and our
minds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but it
may well be that the more attention we give to these goods,
th e more d is ta n t we feel from them and from those who are
believing enough to buy them. To use a different imagery,
the very obligation and profitablility of appearing always in
a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces
us to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of
the stage. ~ Erving Goffman

I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is - because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs - not just amoral but immoral. The ignorant psychopath and or brute who mistreats his children must be punished but can be understood. Those who claim a heavenly warrant for the cruelty have been tainted by evil, and also constitute far more danger. ~ Christopher Hitchens

...the guy might be a cold-blooded amoral sadistic killer and a cartload of tiles short of a watertight roof, but there was nothing wrong with his intelligence. [Caligula in Marcus Corvinus's eyes] ~ David Wishart

Vile, ruthless, amoral. Isn't that why you hired Kaz in the first place? Because he does the things that no one else dares? Go on, Van Eck. Break my legs and see what happens. Dare him."
Had she really believed a merch could outthink Kaz Brekker? Kaz would get her free and then they'd show this man exactly what whores and canals rats could do. ~ Leigh Bardugo

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue. ~ Anne Michaels

EDUCATION TEACHES US HOW TO THINK, INTELLIGENCE HOW TO QUESTION, AND OUR MORALITY WHAT TO DO WITH WHAT WE KNOW. BE WARY THEN OF THE EDUCATED, INTELLIGENT, AND AMORAL PERSON, FOR THEY WILL KNOW ONLY THAT THEY CAN DO A THING, NOT WHETHER THEY SHOULD. ~ Mark T. Barnes

The good moral work of art should have all the qualities that a good amoral work of art should have, such as formal unity, balance, contrast, and a sensitivity to the material out of which it is made. ~ Norman McLaren

The most damaging example of the systems archetype called "drift to low performance" is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. The workings of the trap have been classic, and awful to behold. Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. This is just what you would expect. After all, we're only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are "not news." They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can't expect everyone to behave like that. And so expectations are lowered. The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love. ~ Donella H. Meadows

Your amoral ingenuity in the pursuit of your interest is perfectly shocking," said Zacharias severely. "Yes, isn't it?" said Prunella, pleased. ~ Zen Cho

I don't think that either self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement is among the defining qualities of an artist ... Beethoven could have been forgiven if his symphonies had gone to his head. Gretchaninoff could also be forgiven if his Dobrinya Nikititch went to his head. But neither one could be forgiven for writing a piece that was amoral, servile, the work of a flunky. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

The (campaign) ads all have the same tone - the voice is hushed and amazed when talking about The Enemy, as if you should worry how this amoral, power-mad, extremist puppy-strangler clawed his way out of hell and landed in your district. And the voice is happy and relieved when talking about The Most Noble Candidate, as though he's Santa, Will Rogers and Lincoln all rolled into one. ~ James Lileks

Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power argues that if corporations have 'person hood' under the law, then it makes sense to question what kind of people they are. He posits that corporations behave with all the classical signs of sociopathy: they are inherently amoral, they elevate their own interests above all others', and they disregard moral and sometimes legal limits on their behavior in pursuit of their own advancement. Organizations of this type would thrive under the leadership of people who have the same traits: sociopaths. ~ M.E. Thomas

These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. ~ Ian McEwan

The Greatest evils inflicted by man over the face of the Earth are wrought not by the self-seekers, the pleasure lovers, or the merely amoral, but by the fervent devotees of ethical principles. ~ Robert Morrison MacIver

Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.

(The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man. ~ Ayn Rand

Why does IPCA use them if they're evil?" he asked, confused.
"They aren't evil. They aren't even really immoral, per se. They're amoral. They don't operate on the same level that we do. For a faerie, the only thing that matters is what they want. That's their good. Anything else is superfluous. So like how they kidnap people, not a big deal - they want the person, they take him. Or killing someone. If you live forever, how much does one mortal life matter in the scheme of things? When you exist outside time, cutting off the forty years a person has left is a non-issue. They don't even notice. ~ Kiersten White

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. ~ Ray Bradbury

World opinion" - that vapid, amoral concept - deems the murder of members of one's group less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Congo elicits virtually no attention from "world opinion." Between 1998 and 2008, according to the International Rescue Committee, 5.4 million people in Congo were killed, and virtually no one in the world knows this. But if a few Iraqi prisoners are sexually humiliated in an American-run prison, or if one Palestinian dies at the hands of an Israeli soldier, the story is on the front pages of the world's newspapers. ~ Dennis Prager

i have been told many times by family, friends, colleagues and strangers that I, a black African Muslim lesbian, am not included in this vision; that my dreams are a reflection of my upbringing in a decadent, amoral Western society that has corrupted who I really am. But who am I, really? Am I allowed to speak for myself or must my desires form the battleground for causes I do not care about? My answer to that is simple: 'no one allows anyone anything.' By rejecting that notion you discover that only you can give yourself permission on how to lead your life, naysayers be damned. In the end something gives way. The earth doesn't move but something shifts. That shift is change and change is the layman's lingo for that elusive state that lovers, dreamers, prophets and politicians call 'freedom'. ~ Diriye Osman

I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, completely unreserved music, the kind that makes you feel that a man is shaking heaven and hell. I believe I love that kind of music because it is amoral. Everything else is so moral that I'm looking for something that isn't. Morality has always seemed to me insufferable. ~ Hermann Hesse

History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. ~ Arthur Koestler

Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

[ ... ] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality ~ Jacques Barzun

emotions are not amoral - they vocalize the inner working of our souls and are as tainted as any other portion of our personality. ~ Dan B. Allender

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest. ~ Steven Pinker

For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The first two concepts - morality and immorality - are well understood in America: codes and boundaries of behavior are set by principles, doctrines, dictate, or convention. It's the third one - amorality - that is largely misunderstood but crucial to identify and comprehend. Amorality is a state of affairs where there are no moral principles or rules to follow or betray. None. Even though a culture may have rules regarding physical behavior, if there are no moral standards regarding truth, for example, then one cannot be right or wrong in such a societal vacuum because there is nothing to be right or wrong about. Therefore, even if lip service to the virtue of truth telling exists on one level or another, lying is firmly established in many cultures as an amoral practice. ~ Alexandra York