Moral Failure Quotes

In the face of severe injustice, a refusal to dissent is the sign of a character flaw or moral failure. ~ Glenn Greenwald

I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love? ~ Susie Bright

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage. ~ Iris Murdoch

Moral failure occurs when people lose focus and gradually drift off the path. ~ Benjamin Watson

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles. ~ Ayn Rand

I've always been accused by my detractors of some sort of moral failure, cowardice, or even lack of humanity by not portraying the human form. I respond that I do better by portraying traces of character and intentions of human volition that no mug or body shot can ever exude. ~ Robert Polidori

Stealing was wrong, I'd been taught in church and everywhere else, but I had a feeling that the money system was wrong, too. I didn't think the world owed me everything, but it also seemed the world wouldn't give me anything that I didn't reach out and grab for myself. To do so, though, was both a mark of moral failure and something that could ruin my life, if I got caught. ~ Sarah Smarsh

It is useful to remember the classical Greeks' attitude to moral failure: in their view it is like taking aim at a target, and missing; it is a bad shot; what you must do is aim again, and do better. In other moral regimes failure is a blemish, a stain that remains, culpable and in need of grace or forgiveness from an outside source. In the classical view, the remedy and improvement is as much the individual's responsibility as the mistake was in the first place. ~ A.C. Grayling

Fat people already are ashamed. It's taken care of. No further manpower needed on the shame front, thx. I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and "choices." Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat forever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they're trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it's because of their own moral failure, and on top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don't even have yet? You know what's shameful? A complete lack of empathy. ~ Lindy West

Nearly every grave moral failure begins with a small sin. ~ Charles Colson

Having a succession and legacy plan in place will make you ready for forced changes due to circumstances beyond your control, like death, any form of incapacity, sudden changes in laws and regulations and even corporate scandals and moral failure. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence. ~ D. A. Carson

A century ago, survival was the main event. Longing was an accepted part of existence. Today, the inability to achieve happiness or fit in with the herd is treated as a kind of moral failure. ~ Heather Havrilesky

Exposure to false doctrine places a person at risk not just for theological errors but for moral failure. ~ Max Anders

Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal. ~ Richard Livingstone

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. ~ Neel Mukherjee

Not all shame comes from wrong doing and not all hiding comes from moral failure. ~ Brent Weeks

You are a totally loved moral failure. ~ Timothy Keller

Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are good people, who are in politics - in both parties - who hold this at arm's length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable. ~ Al Gore

A can't in a can - it's carbonated failure that's ready to drink. It tastes like the back half of love. ~ Jarod Kintz

But the stories had made him different, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was. ~ Nancy Horan

In reply to '@cloppingemo: everyone sees me as a failure and a horrible person and they make sure I know:
'Everyone', doesn't. Trust me on this one; You're being dramatic. You're in a hard place but it's important to go through. Hang in there, buckle down, hold your head up, and do your best. That's all you can do and when people criticize you, listen to them; Either they're right or wrong but they're not always trying to hurt you. Try and really understand where criticism is coming from. "You can do better," is well intentioned. "You're stupid," is not. ~ Patrick Stump

Stop judging your life only by the failures," he whispered.
"What should I do?" she whispered. "I'm always going to fail."
"We all do," he said softly, his voice closer now. "We all fail. But none of us fail all the time. ~ Michelle Sagara West

Failure to act always brings consequences. But sometimes, those consequences can be turned to one's advantage. ~ Timothy Zahn

Hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many of them have not yet been discovered. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Take a guy who can walk on water, who can raise people from the dead, who can look at you and tell you what you had for breakfast ... if a guy like that can't find twelve trustworthy mates, who can? Stop at eleven and call it done, that's the moral of that story. ~ Liam Perrin

Let your experience be not one of failure but one that has taught you new things which you would not have known had you not tried ~ Epiphana Lewis

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. Knowledge is a viaticum. Though is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light. All progress tends toward the solution. Some day, people will be amazed. As the human race ascends, the deepest layers will naturally emerge from the zone of distress. The effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation level. ~ Victor Hugo

Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The greatest obstacle to success is the fear of failure. ~ Debasish Mridha

We cannot finally judge the correctness of what we do in evangelism by the immediate response that we see. It is important to understand this truth, because a failure to understand it can distract well-meaning churches into pragmatic, results-oriented endeavors and it can transform pastors into neurotic people-manipulators. ~ Mark Dever

Our ability to make moral judgements, decisions and choices is a pre-condition of human development in a free society. To deny that women have the capacity to make reproductive choices denies their moral agency; it denies their humanity. ~ Ann Furedi

Stress is not necessarily something bad it all depends on how you take it. The stress of exhilarating, creative successful work is beneficial, while that of failure, humiliation or infection is detrimental. ~ Hans Selye

Beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world ~ Charles Bukowski

It is so tremendously important that the women of the Church stand strong and immovable for that which is correct and proper under the plan of the Lord. They must begin in their own homes. They can teach it in their classes. They can voice it in their communities. They must be the teachers and the guardians of their daughters. When you save a girl, you save generations. I see this as one bright shining hope in a world that is marching toward moral self-destruction. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of out foreign exchange, was being spent on the war ... I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave a lecture with the title "Newton, the Man." ... Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions. ~ Freeman Dyson

When you can overcome the fear of failure, success will not be far away. ~ Debasish Mridha

Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person's failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him. ~ Anonymous

Accurate analysis of over 25,000 men and women who had experienced failure, disclosed the fact that lack of decision was near the head of the list of the 30 major causes of failure. This is no mere statement of a theory - it is a fact. Procrastination, ~ Napoleon Hill

Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom ~ Amanda Craig

Achieving the right to basic education for all is thus one of the biggest moral challenges of our times. ~ Koichiro Matsuura

My teachers used to call me a failure ~ Tony Blair

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. ~ H.L. Mencken

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

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past. ~ Peter Singer

A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. This is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society. That is what gives a nation its tone, its fiber, its integrity, its moral style, its capacity to endure. ~ John W. Gardner

The Media: bold sex and violence, timid politics and morals. ~ Mason Cooley

The change would be meaningful only if it was the doing of men of unassailable moral authority, speaking to down-to-earth interests on behalf of higher powers. What was needed was less to give complete freedom to the natural impulses of the merchants than to tie them to some dominant moral position. ~ Georges Bataille

The uttermost beautiful and glorious feeling is a Trust. It is a breath of love too, even the key to all doors of one's way. Breaking the Trust is a suicide of moral and harmonious values. ~ Ehsan Sehgal

Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe. ~ Sumner Redstone

When we recognise that unity of all living things, then at once arises the question - how can we support this life of ours with least injury to the lives around us; how can we prevent our own life adding to the suffering of the world in which we live? ~ Annie Besant

Christian magazine Sojourners, likes to point out that the Bible contains more than three thousand references to alleviating poverty - enough reason, he thinks, for making this a central moral issue for Christians. ~ Peter Singer

It is a sad day for our country when the moral foundation of our law and the acknowledgment of God has to be hidden from public view to appease a federal judge. ~ Soledad O'Brien

Failure is Central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. ~ Henry Petroski

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

All the logic in the world could not blunt the pain. Logic could not blunt her terrible sense of personal failure. Only time would do those things, and time would do an imperfect job. ~ Stephen King

You must not end your life because you failed an examination. Failing an examination or making a mistake does not make you a failure at life. The context of life is broader than that. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Just when the womb gets too old for babies, Sarai gets pregnant. Just when the failure is too great for grace, David is pardoned. And just when the road is too dark for Mary and Mary, the angel glows and the Savior shows and the two women will never be the same. The lesson? Three words. Don't give up. ~ Max Lucado

For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections. ~ Margaret Mead

Moral spontaneity" corresponds entirely with "religious and orthodox philosophy", "constitutional monarchy", "the Christian state", "freedom with certain limits", or in a figure, to the hero fetters to a sick bed. ~ Max Stirner

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite. ~ Francis Bacon

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert. ~ Luke Rhinehart

Fifteen days ago, he'd sat in his Christian Ethics class, rooted in the belief that murder was a grave moral evil. A capital crime punished with eternal damnation. ~ Pepper Winters

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity. ~ Henry Hazlitt