Moral Conflict Quotes

It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world. ~ John Bartholomew Gough

The believer caught between the flesh and Spirit is also caught between death and life. That is what happens when God intervenes in a human life. That intervention does not necessarily bring tranquility. In fact, it is more likely to bring tension and conflict. It is the life surrendered to the flesh which lacks inner conflict, for the decline through sin to death can be so easy. It is when the Spirit enters a life to contest the sway of sin and counter the weakness of the flesh that conflict ensues. The presence of moral conflict is a sign of the Spirit presence, not the Spirit's absence. ~ James D.G. Dunn

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world. ~ Howard Zinn

It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security. ~ Max Lerner

We now know that anything which is economically right is also morally right. There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals. ~ Henry Ford

The United States has faced threats from criminal groups, from terrorists, from spies throughout our history, and we have limited our responses. We haven't resorted to total war every time we have a conflict around the world, because that restraint is what defines us. That restraint is what gives us the moral standing to lead the world. ~ Edward Snowden

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise. ~ Kenneth Scott Latourette

The moral decisions of others should be treated with respect, as long as such decisions do not conflict with the principle of tolerance. ~ Karl Popper

Stories are based in conflict, and when the conflict is resolved the story ends. That's because for the most part happiness is amorphous, wordless, and largely uninteresting. ~ Ann Patchett

Why do so many marriages fail? Because nobody gets taught how to be married. We're not taught how to pick a mate, or why to pick a mate; we don't know how to manage our emotions once we're in a marriage; we don't know how to resolve marital conflict. Married people have never been taught why they or their spouses feel the way they do and act the way they do. Nobody has ever taught us the fundamentals. ~ Phil McGraw

Learning by faith and from experience are two of the central features of the Father's plan of happiness. The Savior preserved moral agency through the Atonement and made it possible for us to act and to learn by faith. ~ David A. Bednar

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much every U.S. citizen's wars as they are the veterans' wars. If we don't assume that civilians have just as much ownership and the moral responsibilities that we have as a nation when we embark on something like that, then we're in a very bad situation. ~ Phil Klay

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. ~ Antonin Artaud

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...), is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party, and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States…
And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalen ~ Christopher Hitchens

It is said by Bush men and women that we fought (the Iraq War) to strike against terrorism - except that Iraq had no documented role in the Sept. 11 attacks. It is said that we fought from a moral objection to tyranny - except that we don't seem all that troubled by tyrants in nations that lack huge oil reserves. Everything is said except the truth: that we rushed into an unnecessary war on a half-baked mission. And that the repercussions of our hubris will shadow us for years. ~ Leonard Pitts

Moral principle is a looser bond than pecuniary interest. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Sometimes the dues we pay to maintain integrity are pretty high, but the ultimate cost of moral compromise is so much higher. ~ Michael Josephson

I don't just do music for the clubs, I do music for the struggle. I do music for everyday niggas, the kids who ain't got no sense of direction. I'm trying to restore some of the morals back into the game, as far as the street. ~ Young Jeezy

Man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this - although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. ~ Steven L. Peck

Think in the name of Almighty God. We must first have a worldwide awakening of the public conscience, a spiritual revival, a moral regeneration, before there can be permanent peace and real economic recovery. To this end we do not need new laws, but a new spirit; we do not need a change of government, but a change of the human heart. There can be no peace, there will be no recovery without it. Therefore, with a change of heart, let's all make a new start. ~ William J.H. Boetcker

The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man. Let me explain what I mean by the white liberal. In America there is no such thing as Democrat or Republican anymore. In America you have liberals and conservatives. The only people living in the past who think in terms of I'm a Democrat or Republican, is the American Negro. He's the one that runs around bragging about party affiliation. He's the one that sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican. But white people are divided into two groups, liberals and conservative. The Democrats who are conservative, vote with the Republicans who are conservative. The Democrats who are liberal vote with the Republicans that are liberal. The white liberal aren't white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro ~ Malcom X

Economic growth is not just a process of more and better machines, and more and better educated people, but also a transformative and destabilizing process associated with widespread creative destruction. Growth thus moves forward only if not blocked by the economic losers who anticipate that their economic privileges will be lost and by the political losers who fear that their political power will be eroded. Conflict ~ Anonymous

Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that. ~ Frans De Waal

Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts
and actions can never produce good results ... We understand this law in
the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental
and moral world - although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating
and they, therefore, do not cooperate with it. ~ James Allen

Why should we take care to maintain focus on the gospel of grace in our interpretations of Daniel? The first reason is to keep our messages Christian. We are not Jews, Muslims, or Hindus whose followers may believe our status with God is determined by our performance. We believe that Christ's finished work is our only hope. To make Daniel simply an example of one who fulfills God's moral imperatives and thus earns his blessing is essentially an unchristian message. Apart from God's justifying, enabling, and preserving grace, no human can do what God requires to be done. Jesus said, "Apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Interpretations of Daniel devoid of the enabling grace of Christ - even in its Old Testament forms of unmerited divine provision - implicitly deny the necessity of Christ. ~ Bryan Chapell

Questions are the heart and soul of constructive conflict. They open up the exploration, bring in new information, and reframe debate. When ~ Margaret Heffernan

I do conscientiously and sincerely believe that the Order of Freemasonry, if not the greatest, is one of the greatest moral and political evils under which the Union is now laboring ... a conspiracy of the few against the equal rights of the many ... Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good. ~ John Quincy Adams

Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly. ~ Immanuel Kant

The man who has struggled bravely with the passions of the body, has fought ably against unclean spirits, and has expelled from his soul the conceptual images they provoke, should pray for a pure heart to be given him and for a spirit of integrity to be renewed within him (cf. Ps. 51:10). In other words, he should pray that by grace he may be completely emptied of evil thoughts and filled with divine thoughts, so that he may become a spiritual world of God, splendid and vast, wrought from moral, natural and theological forms of contemplation. ~ Maximus The Confessor

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost. ~ Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway- its true religion? Wasn't the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons- but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it. That summer, the one you'll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images ... flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that become our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion? ~ Jess Walter

Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic. ~ John Rawls

Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties. ~ Anna Brownell Jameson

He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral. As ~ Jack London

Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man, it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, for she must either neglect her family, or her profession. ~ Harriet Hosmer

In rallies like those in Johnson's Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised characteristics inherent in the godless. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, the message goes, are no longer human beings. They are types. This new, exclusive community fosters rigidity, conformity and intolerance. In this new binary world segments of the human race are disqualified from moral and ethical consideration. And because fundamentalist followers live in a binary universe, they are incapable of seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers to create a Christian America, then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. This belief system negates the possibility of the ethical life. It fails to grasp that goodness must be sought outside the self and that the best defense against evil is to seek it within. When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight. It is only by grasping our own capacity for evil, our own darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay. When evil is purely e ~ Chris Hedges

Don't focus on her hiss. Remember her purr. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Every principle that wants to command strong allegiance must make a moral case. Men want to feel that what they are doing is useful, but they want also, and mainly, to feel that it is right. Freedom is one of these principles ~ Henry Wallich