Quotes about Moral Absolutism

Necmettin Erbakan

In this country there are two parties: the righteous and the fallacious

Erbakan aid this in a speech made before he became Prime Minister. After he left office, he was tried and convicted for this statement which violated Turkey’s strict ban against incitement of one group against another.

Henry Adams

It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

William Penn

Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

Ayn Rand

There can be no compromise on moral principles.

H. L. Mencken

The worst government is the most moral.

He was referring to governments that imposed some form of morality in their citizens. Free governments do no dictate a morality and require their citizens to follow it. He was very much opposed to Prohibition which he saw as a poor government—Herbert Hoover’s Administration—which was imposing its narrow morality on all. He was very suspicious of government actions where the government claimed that the action was for moral objectives. This is a classic Libertarian view. In general, it is Fundamentalists and ideologues who want to impose their particular morality on all. See {620693} for a related idea.

Ayn Rand

If the truth shall kill them, let them die.

C. S. Lewis

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

Blaise Pascal

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Pascal was himself a very religious man, but observed this phenomenon about many religious people.

Pope Benedict XVI

Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not... with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

Isaac Asimov

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Peter Kreeft

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

C. S. Lewis

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity" and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

Mahatma Gandhi

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

Gustave Flaubert

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

Ayn Rand

The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.

Steve Coogan

I don't apologize for my behavior anymore. Whatever I do or don't do shouldn't matter. Moral certainty is dangerous. Moral certainty is what makes people go to war unnecessarily and illegally. Morality, as any halfway intelligent human being would tell you, is a very subjective thing.

C. S. Lewis

Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

Leona Marshall Libby

I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn't have done differently. In wartime, it was a desperate time .... When you are in a war to the death, I don't think you stand around and ask, is it right?

Dr. Libby worked with Enrico Fermi to create the first nuclear chain reaction to prove the feasibility of a nuclear bomb. She was the only female on the team.

Leo Tolstoy

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.