Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

In my years, I had the opportunity to observe peoples and countries. I see some countries doing well, others failing, and my analysis of things is that whether you fail or succeed is a function of your value system.

Morality is a social necessity

A country is not only what it does but what it tolerates.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

Certain other societies may respect the rule of force--we respect the rule of law.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

You need to identify the values that come out of that kind of belief system, because I don't see them. All the polls I look at say, for example, that adultery is committed as much in the Bible Belt as in any other part of the country. The same goes for abortion, child abuse, spouse abuse or murder.

This point seems counter-intuitive, given the amount of conspicuous vulgarity, vice, and immorality in America. Indeed some Islamic fundamentalists argue that their regimes are morally superior to the United States because they seek to foster virtue among the citizens.

Goodness means the highest degree of popularity.

I have always maintained that society has no business dictating morality.

Ethics is a fluid term ...It's the standards by which a civilized society lives.

Against human nature one cannot legislate.

Protestant Christianity ... tutored the first generations of Americans. It provided what we today would call the value system of the society.

We find the people to be no better than their laws.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let's put it that way.

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.

Society's mores have changed, and what used to be thought not to be cruel and unusual now is thought to be cruel and unusual.

Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted.

Culture is a reflection of values.

Humans are the only ones who are the custodians of other people's morals.

Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.