Moral Behavior Quotes

The general confusion is that our moral behavior is what justifies us before God. Most of us would never say that with our mouths but we feel that lie in our heart and believe it in our minds. You can be morally upright and not be a worshipper of Christ at all. ~ Matt Chandler

Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces. That raises the sinister and seemingly paradoxical possibility that radical individualism is the handmaiden of collectivist tyranny.

This individualism, it is quite apparent in our time, attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral behavior in its members. Private association are routinely denied the autonomy to define their membership for themselves.

The upshot is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly dictated or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less of a member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the state. Thus does radical individualism prepare the way for its opposite. ~ Robert H. Bork

Are things moral simply because God says so? Or does God give certain orders because they are inherently moral? This is the question at the core of Plato's Euthyphro dilemma, a problem that lies at the heart of religious debates about the divinity of moral authority (4). If morality exists separate from God's will, there is no reason to rely on God for moral behavior; one could have moral standards independently without divine feedback. On the other hand, if God creates morality simply by saying whether something is right or wrong, then that's not really morality; it's arbitrariness. Morality would become nothing more than the whimsy of a divine being blindly followed by humans. ~ Armin Navabi

Those who use the Bible as a reference for moral behavior are simply cherry-picking those teachings, such as the Golden Rule, that they have independently decided are moral for other reasons, while ignoring those teachings with which they disagree. ~ Victor J. Stenger

And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time. ~ Ron Paul

Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Movie and television stars lay down the law of
fashions, manners, speech, and even moral behavior. It has been proven that a movie or a television program can brainwash. ~ Billy Graham

Eliot always said, "I'm sorry. I had to do that." If you are all right really, really all right, you don't do things that are sorry. ~ Rumer Godden

The men who espoused unpopular causes may have been considered misguided, but they were rarely attacked for their morals or their masculinity. Women who did the same thing were apt to be denounced as harlots or condemned for being unfeminine - an all-purpose word that was used to describe almost any category of female behavior of which men disapproved. ~ Margaret Truman Daniel

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern ~ Dean Koontz

One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

The measure of and self-congratulation for our own intelligence should have its basis in our moral behavior as well as our smarts. ~ April Gornik

To sustain moral behavior, people need more than simply a list of rules. They need to be people who have a comprehensive view of the universe - a religion, or an ideology that functions like a religion - that stands behind those rules. Only such a comprehensive view can explain the rules (supplying answers to the crucial "ethical content questions" mentioned above), organize the rules (so we know how to handle difficult ethical judgments), justify the rules (making them seem plausible, and therefore worthy of obedience), and sacralize the rules (making them sacred and truly moral, rather than merely prudent advice). Without a comprehensive view of the universe, no body of ethical rules remains coherent for long. ~ Greg Forster

Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define the "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival". ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law. It's very important to have a moral education. ~ Richard Dawkins

It must be noted that the non-aggression alone can never be the starting point in justifying moral behavior or serving as a fundamental principle of ethics. There must be a justification of the non-aggression principle before such a case can be made. The very implication of the term "principle" implies that non-aggression serves as the foundation for a system of ethics, which it cannot be. It is certainly not an axiom since it is not a self-evident truth. ~ Daniel Alexander Brackins

But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

People have too often valued "proper" religious beliefs more than proper moral behavior, and even slaughtered others for not having the right religious beliefs. This is a common occurrence even in our time. ~ Dennis Prager

It is a notable circumstance that mothers who are themselves open to severe comments as to their, moral character, are generally most solicitous as to the virtuous behavior of their daughters. ~ Antoine Rivarol

Mind was impure and his moral behavior was gross. But he had in lavish abundance some of the dramatic trappings of holiness. Along with his burning eyes, he had a fluent tongue. His head was filled with Scriptures, and his deep, powerful voice made him a compelling preacher. Besides, he had wandered the length and breadth of Russia and twice made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. He presented himself as a humble penitent, a man who had sinned greatly, been forgiven and commanded to do God's work. It was a touching symbol of his humility, people said, that he kept the nickname "Rasputin" which he had earned as a young man in his native village. "Rasputin" in Russian means "dissolute. ~ Robert K. Massie

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification). ~ Jonathan Haidt

Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of
their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream. ~ Michael Pollan

Victory is always valid, if people treat each other with moral behavior, such as teamwork. ~ Abrar Ahmed Chowdhury

By comparison, the Integrated Human model of human nature, in addition to the two elements of our previous model, includes: A conscious analytic system, known as the slow brain (where logic resides) A subconscious intuitive system, or fast brain The full range of motivational drives (of which the drive to acquire is only one) Basic ideas of moral behavior, or moral intuitions Distinguishing characteristics, or personality traits Together, these elements of our nature provide all of the fundamental functions necessary for living life as a complete, Integrated Human - and they are the springboard for the development of leadership character. As our research data has shown, the ability to leverage all of these areas influence leadership's ability to achieve positive organizational outcomes. ~ Fred Kiel

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government. ~ George Will

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age. ~ Ivan Illich

The "us versus them" mindset coupled with our social nature implies that we have an innate need to belong to clearly defined in-groups. ~ Gad Saad

Excuse me there. If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting, when a man has no constancy of mind. My father never changed, and he preached plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good man - few better. When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book. That's my opinion, and I think anybody's stomach will bear me out. ~ George Eliot

Far from being a truly independent guide to moral conducts, the…[holy books are]… like a Rorschach Test: which passages people choose to emphasize reflects as much as it shapes their moral character and interests. ~ Elizabeth S. Anderson

For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness. ~ Matthew Stewart

The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives ~ Jonathan Haidt

The central attitudes driving Rambo are:
Strength and aggressiveness are good; compassion and conflict resolution are bad.
Anything that could be even remotely associated with homosexuality, including walking away from possible violence or showing any fear or grief, has to be avoided at any cost.
Femaleness and femininity (which he associates with homosexuality) are inferior. Women are here to serve men and be protected by them.
Men should never hit women, because it is unmanly to do so. However, exceptions to this rule can be made for my own partner if her behavior is bad enough. Men need to keep their women in line.
You are a thing that belongs to me, akin to a trophy. ~ Lundy Bancroft

For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind. ~ Antonin Artaud

Better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unkowable, than my chemistry, a mess compounded of stenches, explosions and small futile mysteries. I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost he same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened_, the practically identica, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. the difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade. ~ Primo Levi

No Body Parts To reduce play aggression and unwanted predatory behavior, never use your (or anyone else's) body parts to play with your cat. I've seen people using their fingers, toes, and hair, or poking their faces into their cat's face, as part of their play. Not good. Instead, maneuver string and wand toys, throw simple toys, and let automated toys do their thing without any participation from you. ~ Mieshelle Nagelschneider

Whoever strikes at marriage either by word or act undermines the foundation of all moral society. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Criticism is a profession which allows one a certain license to be vicious outside the bounds of normal civilized behavior. ~ Douglas Preston

Karen merely nodded a hello, feeling slightly apart despite the utter normalcy of the morning, feeling, for the first time, that she belonged to a secret, shameful society ruled by aberrant desire and behavior. ~ V.S. Kemanis

We have the - the longest, friendliest border, you know, for the - for the longest time in the history - in recorded history, really, with Canada. And they get to sit on their moral perch, you know, take the moral high ground, say, oh, United States, shame on you about Iraq. They make us look bad internationally. And it's really not fair. ~ Tucker Carlson

I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all....They want a certain kind of identity; they're jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety. ~ Truman Capote

What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people. That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. From that, our own people began to sense the pride. ~ Dennis Banks

We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of 'civilized' manners and 'cultured' social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us. ~ Stephen Batchelor

The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its on fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you ever make a fist? ~ Daniel Gilbert

Any little thing that brings us back into communion with the natural world and the spiritual power that permeates all life will help us to move a little further along the path of human moral and spiritual evolution. ~ Jane Goodall

There is too much animal courage in society and not sufficient moral courage. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

The traditional respect which nations pay to military valor cannot be denied. As every country has a right to self-defense, every country has a right to give honor to its military leaders. But the honoring of military leaders brings deadly danger to mankind unless both the moral authority granted to them and the technical means at their disposal are strictly limited. Military power should never be confused with moral virtue, and military leaders should never be entrusted with weapons of unlimited destruction. ~ Freeman Dyson

Hollywood-Nobody's impressed by anybody because they're all too consumed with trying to cover up their own shortcomings. Hollywood is a microcosm of a world of lazy moral ideals and social indifference where every man is trying to convince himself he's a king. ~ J. Matthew Nespoli

The moral duty to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency ... At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky

My principal battle with the North Vietnamese was a moral one, and prayer was my prime source of strength. ~ Jeremiah Denton

They [parents] can help the children work out schedules for homework, play, and television that minimize the conflicts involved inwhat to do first. They can offer moral support and encouragement to persist, to try again, to struggle for understanding and mastery. And they can share a child's pleasure in mastery and accomplishment. But they must not do the job for the children. ~ Dorothy H Cohen

It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable' ... ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

It is generally admitted that the cultural values (humanization) and the existing institutions and policies of society are rarely,if ever, in harmony. This opinion has found expression in the distinction between culture and civilization, according to which "culture" refers to some higher dimension of human autonomy and fulfillment, while "civilization" designates the realm of necessity, of socially necessary work and behavior, where man is not really himself and in his own element but is subject to heteronomy, to external conditions and needs. ~ Herbert Marcuse

Speak graciously to young men as you would to your brothers. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When actors get a bad name for diva behavior - I've never seen it. Because my experience with people who are really famous actors is that they work really hard. ~ Hayley Atwell

Contraries are cured by contraries. ~ Bill Vaughan

We humans are conflicted beings. Our beliefs don't always harmonize with our instincts, and our behavior doesn't always reflect our beliefs ... We wage war between the person we are and the person we hope to become. ~ Brandon Mull

What many teachers observe as violent behavior is often really just playful aggression. ~ Brian Sutton-Smith

The worst government is the most moral. ~ H.L. Mencken

elders serve as conduits between the divine realm and the mundane world, making the abstract truths of spirituality accessible to the community by embodying them in their everyday behavior. ~ Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The human desire to experience union with others is rooted in the specific conditions of existence that characterize the human species and is one of the strongest motivators of human behavior. ~ Erich Fromm

When they can hear each other over the wind and the music, they speak Connecticut: I will not Stamford this type of behavior. What's Groton into you? What did Danbury his Hartford? New Haven can wait. Darien't no place I'd rather I'd rather be. ~ David Levithan

So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Love and respect a woman. Look to her not only for comfort, but for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you have none. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

I am fat and flabby and that Dr. J. I. Packer is right when he says, "Here then is the root cause of our moral flabbiness; we have neglected God's Law."3 ~ Alistair Begg

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind. ~ Dudley Nichols

During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications fo ~ Michael Talbot

Active management strategies demand uninstitutional behavior from institutions, creating a paradox that few can unravel. Establishing and maintaining an unconventional investment profile requires acceptance of uncomfortably idiosyncratic portfolios, which frequently appear downright imprudent in the eyes of conventional wisdom. ~ David F. Swensen

Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it. ~ William Howard Taft

The topdog may win the game of force. But not the moral issue - and when that dawns upon him and his allies, change of consciousness sets in, and demoralization starts thawing the frozen heart. The game is over. ~ Johan Galtung

As to behavior, the leader must be respectable. A well-ordered life is the fruit of a well-ordered mind. The life of the leader should reflect the beauty and orderliness of God. ~ J. Oswald Sanders