Moral Contradictions Quotes

Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.

Men frequently do good only to give themselves opportunity of doing ill with impunity.

How on earth did it come about that all the things denounced in the Gospels are violently defended by the Christian sects?

Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.

There is no possible line of conduct which has at some time and place been condemned, and which has not at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.

I try to photograph my own and society's hypocrisy.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

We are used to politicians bending facts and logic to fit their aims, but the problem goes well beyond political rhetoric. Our larger discourse is dominated by cultural authorities who want us to believe things that the human mind rebels against—that there is no such thing as biological sex, that the way to fight past discrimination is with present discrimination, that not punishing crime is the way to prevent crime, that words can mean whatever they tell us they mean.

New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate.

You know what is interesting, Condit is very conservative. He voted to post the ten commandments in schools. Yet, he himself broke the 11th commandment, 'Thou shall not put thy rod in thy staff.'

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

In New York State they have a strange law that says you can't get a divorce unless you can prove adultery - and it's weird, because the Ten Commandments say 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' But New York State says you have to. Well, finally, what happened was that my wife committed adultery for me. She's always been more mechanically inclined than I have.

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in, sing Amazing Grace all the way to the Swiss banks.

The best of women are hypocrites.

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.

Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.

I learned two things growing up in Texas. 1: God loves you, and you're going to burn in hell forever. 2: Sex is the dirtiest and most dangerous thing you can possibly do, so save it for someone you love.

Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.

I think our society is fragmented. Messages regarding human sexuality have always been mixed in America. We are a schizophrenic nation. We were founded initially by Puritans, who escaped repression only to establish their own. Then the founding fathers gave us the Constitution to separate church and state. But the one thing that got left out of all those laws was human sexuality.

I suppose we make kids the repository of our highest ideals because children are powerless. In that way we can have ideals and ignore them at the same time.

A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.