Public Morals Quotes

It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail. The religion and public liberty of a people are intimately connected; their interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin'd to destroy the people's liberties, practice every art to poison their morals.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

Censor, n. An officer of certain governments, employed to supress the works of genius. Among the Romans the censor was an inspector of public morals, but the public morals of modern nations will not bear inspection.

People have no morals, I swear to God. The things that people do for ratings! It's unforgivable.

He is guilty if he wastes the money of the people, the taxes which they have paid, in luxury, pomp, and debauchery. He who should improve the morals of the people, be the guardian of the law, and improve their education should not pervert them by his bad example.

To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.

This relic of antiquity ... is now distinguished only by its absurdity and its gross deflection of public morals.... It is worse than useless... .We hope that our Legislature will soon put an end to this ridiculous farce.

No one can quarrel with those who desire to maintain the theatre on a proper moral plane, but we are seeing too much in the world today of an effort to regulate too minutely by law the lives and morals of whole groups of people.

The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness, and the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.

He is, like almost all the eminent men of this country, only half educated. His morals, public and private, are loose.

The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.

Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and intertwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally, I do not mean figuratively, but literally impossible for us to figure what the loss would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards toward which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves.

It's illegal to be naked.

Wherever God's word is circulated, it stirs the hearts of the people, it prepares for public morals. Circulate that word, and you find the tone of morals immediately changed. It is God peaking to man.

I have raised the morals and sobriety of the people.

The Press has not only a great influence over our manners and morals, but contributes largely to our pleasures.

Ice cream shops are just houffs, persons just entering and enjoying themselves in a manner which is not proper.

I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion. I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land ... considering those evils, I hereby promised to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality.

Let there arise out from among you a party inviting to all that is good; enjoying what is right and forbidding what is wrong: they are the ones to attain felicity

Asceticism in most cases is either the result of a sordid imagination or of passion diverted from its natural course, and experience has shown that when the protection of public morals is entrusted to its votaries, the consequences are usually appalling.

If . . . a principle of true Religion [i.e., true Christianity] should . . . gain ground, there is no estimating the effects on public morals, and the consequent influence on our political welfare.

…the exorbitant wealth of individuals has a most baneful influence on public virtue, and therefore should be carefully guarded against. A wicked rich man soon corrupts a whole neighborhood, and a few of them will poison the morals of a whole community.

The society girl meets more dangers than the girl on the stage. There is more danger at a tango tea than in the theatre. The actor is less dangerous than the dancing master.

A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.