Nina Bawden Quotes

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I'd forgotten it's an important thing to give thought to your morality and how you intend to live your life.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

The foundations of morality are like all other foundations: If you dig too much about them, the superstructure will come tumbling down.

What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command.

Morality is a social necessity

Ethics are pre-determined and a matter of discovery, not a evolved concept.

Our moral philosophy determines our values - what we care about and what we don't care about - and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives.