Moral Dilemma Quotes

#1. Here is my final point ... About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography ... What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, or take into my body as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet? And for those who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about how to answer that question, I'll answer it for you. NONE of your fucking business. Take that to the bank, cash it, and go fucking on a vacation out of my life. #Quote by Bill Hicks

#2. In a moral dilemma where you lost something either way, making the choice would feel bad either way, so you could temporarily save yourself a little mental pain by refusing to decide. At the cost of not being able to plan anything in advance, and at the cost of incurring a huge bias toward inaction or waiting until too late ... #Quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky

#3. At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish. #Quote by George Orwell

#4. Our society imposes on us a moral duty to live and, hence, to condemn suicide. However, with her apparent admiration for antiquity, Anna may have found her prop in the Greek philosophers, who thought every person should choose for themselves when they die. Nietzsche also considered that the individual had a full moral right to take his own life. He used the word freitod or voluntary death.' Aune raised a pointed index finger. 'But she had to confront another moral dilemma. Revenge. Insofar as she professed to be a Christian, Christian ethics demand that you should not take revenge. The paradox is, naturally, that Christians worship a God who is the greatest avenger of them all. Defy him and you burn in eternal hell, an act of revenge which is completely out of proportion to the crime, almost a case for Amnesty International, if you ask me. #Quote by Jo Nesbø

#5. Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one's mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. #Quote by Algis Valiunas

#6. A public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside ... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast? #Quote by Jodi Picoult

#7. Each generation, as it seeks to advance the common good, must ask anew: 'What are the requirements that governments may reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend? By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved?' #Quote by Pope Benedict XVI

#8. The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim's breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new "gadget," as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb - a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki - brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated. #Quote by Algis Valiunas

#9. The moral dilemma that the little mermaid must confront - that she can only live by killing the one she loves - is the ethical choice at the heart of love. The other person, their identity and feelings, can be sacrificed for our pleasure. #Quote by Rod Dubey

#10. The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable #Quote by May Sarton

#11. Aristotle said time is a measure of change, and this movie is about changing in time, through time, while remaining the same person. That's a philosophical paradox and a moral dilemma. But 'Casablanca' says it's possible. You can have both. That's what it means. And that's my wish for you: that you would have both. #Quote by Robert McKee

#12. My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life? #Quote by Jonathan Haidt

#13. In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another. #Quote by John Gardner

#14. Each and every one of you is a sovereign human being with free will granted to you by the Maker. But he didn't leave you to wander in this life without guidance. He whispers truth to you in the face of every moral dilemma you encounter. At every turn, with every choice, you have only to listen to your conscience to know the right and just course. #Quote by David A. Wells

#15. Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place. #Quote by Rick Riordan

#16. I do feel that even though I didn't grow up being a big sci-fi fan or comic books or superhero fan, I felt myself definitely gravitate towards these movies that have a high concept and yet they're giving you a moral dilemma within that. #Quote by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#17. Satyagraha can rid society of all evils, political, economic and moral. #Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

#18. The people who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal. When they were on their first mountain, their ego had some vision of what it was shooting for - some vision of prominence, pleasure, and success. Down in the valley they lose interest in their ego ideal. Of course afterward they still feel and sometimes succumb to their selfish desires. But, overall, they realize the desires of the ego are never going to satisfy the deep regions they have discovered in themselves. They realize, as Henri Nouwen put it, that they are much better than their ego ideal.
Second, they rebel against the mainstream culture. All their lives they've been taking economics classes or living in a culture that teaches that human beings pursue self-interest - money, power, fame. But suddenly they are not interested in what other people tell them to want. They want to want the things that are truly worth wanting. They elevate their desires. The world tells them to be a good consumer, but they want to be the one consumed - by a moral cause. The world tells them to want independence, but they want interdependence - to be enmeshed in a web of warm relationships. The world tells them to want individual freedom, but they want intimacy, responsibility, and commitment. The world wants them to climb the ladder and pursue success, but they want to be a person for others. The magazines on the magazine rack want them to ask "What can I do to m #Quote by David Brooks

#19. What responsibility are you avoiding ...
He wasn't avoiding responsibility ...
Though there was one thing he clung to. An excuse, perhaps, like the dead emperor. It was the soul of the wretch. Apathy. The belief that nothing was his fault, the belief that he couldn't change anything. If a man was cursed, or if he believed he didn't have to care, then he didn't need to hurt when he failed. Those failures couldn't have been prevented. Someone or something else had ordained them. #Quote by Brandon Sanderson

#20. They call good evil and evil good. There are those who are so easily offended that they lose their ability to ever discern any truth, and this is often derived from a sort of frenzy by way of their own masked prejudice. #Quote by Criss Jami

#21. Control thought-forms are the basis of our deepest moral crisis. #Quote by Bryant McGill

#22. Most of my failures can be ascribed to the fact that I chose that which was 'easy' over that which was 'right'. And while it's 'right' to admit this to myself, it isn't 'easy.' So, which choice am I going to make this time? #Quote by Craig D. Lounsbrough

#23. Morals: They're nothing but a coded survival instinct! #Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

#24. They don't write books and make movies about people who make peace with the unjust deaths of others. They write them about people who muster their moral courage and fight for the weak and the innocent, even at their own peril. #Quote by John Ensor

#25. Because of our failure to live out our beliefs, our own lack of moral clarity, and our meddling with partisan politics, Western culture no longer looks to Christianity as its moral source. #Quote by Philip Yancey

#26. Power lacks moral or principles. It only has interests. #Quote by Horacio Castellanos Moya

#27. We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos. #Quote by Colin Meloy

#28. Money is not good or evil. It has no morals or intentions on its own. Money reflects the character of the user. #Quote by Dave Ramsey

#29. The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world. #Quote by Don Richardson

#30. You don't need the technical understanding to make the moral judgments. #Quote by Barbara Katz Rothman

#31. Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men havethe same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable. #Quote by Angelina Grimke

#32. The whole concept of "violence" is flawed from the get-go, for it makes no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate force. The use of the word in this generic sense implies that the "violence" of the criminal is no different from the "violence" of the policeman who subdues him. Originally a Marxist idea, this worked its way into the mainstream beginning about 50 or 60 years ago, when people began to think it very clever and sophisticated to act as if there were no difference between the two things, or that the difference was only a matter of how "society" had distributed power between them. Since then, the idea of "violence" as generic and not in its original sense -- related to "violate" -- of criminal and illegitimate violence has steadily gained ground until it is now a commonplace of moral debate, in America as it is everywhere else in the Western world.
#Quote by James Bowman

#33. What constitutes misuse of the universe? This question can be answered in one word: greed ... . Greed constitutes the most grievous wrong. LAURENTI MAGESA, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life #Quote by Christopher Ryan

#34. But whether it truly exists or not, humans need the idea of Hell, whether it be to scare us into a moral life, comfort the smug ones who believe everyone else is going there, or simply to remind us that the actions of our lives, good or ill, live beyond those lives themselves, and the accounting of them may occur past the day we ourselves happen to stop. #Quote by John Scalzi

#35. If we speak lightly about serious things, and seriously about inconsequential things - we will be unable to discern what is good because our entire moral ballast will shift. #Quote by Hannah Anderson

#36. No doubt we instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations. #Quote by Peter Singer

#37. The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it. #Quote by Peter Singer

#38. Capitalism is astonishingly efficient at generating new wealth, but it operates beneficently only
when the market is shaped by moral forces coming from both the law and the culture-derived ultimately from religion. #Quote by Charles W. Colson

#39. Christians are good citizens, and take human laws very seriously, for religious reasons, not just for secular reasons. That's why they are better citizens than atheists, and certainly better citizens than moral relativists and subjectivists: they have stronger motives for obedience. #Quote by Peter Kreeft

#40. Certainly, the church is not primarily a moral institution, but the bearer of a hope. #Quote by Johann Baptist Metz

#41. There can be no compromise on moral principles. #Quote by Ayn Rand

#42. Bolshevism failed because it was both unnatural and immoral. Our system stands. Is it wrong? Of course it is wrong, at a thousand points! Is it clumsy? Of course it is clumsy. By all right and reason it ought to break down. But it does not - because it is instinct with certain economic and moral fundamentals. The economic fundamental is labour. Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. It is men's labour that makes the harvest what it is. That is the economic fundamental: every one of us is working with material which we did not and could not create, but which was presented to us by Nature. #Quote by Henry Ford

#43. There can be no stronger claim to a physician's assistance than at the time when death is imminent, a moral judgment implied by the state's own recognition of the legitimacy of medical procedures necessarily hastening the moment of impending death. #Quote by David Souter

#44. When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter. #Quote by Pearl S. Buck

#45. I don't mind people going about unobtrusively doing good, but I can't stomach moral indignation. #Quote by Kate Ross

#46. President Obama was right to ban torture, but the public must understand that this decision carries a potential cost in lost information. That's what makes it a moral choice. #Quote by David Ignatius

#47. To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever. #Quote by George Eliot

#48. Setting sail using different moral compasses causes a relationship to go in circles. #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#49. As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing. #Quote by Andrew O'Hagan

#50. You're an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I'm an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I'm in an ideal position to appreciate it. #Quote by Joseph Heller

#51. The elephants we have seen taunted and tormented and slaughtered by the likes of Safari Club do not have time to wait while the world's ethicists work out some centuries-long paradigm shift in moral thought. #Quote by Matthew Scully

#52. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, "Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras." Bourgeois families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the family's status, whereas today the family album of photographs verifies the individual's existence: the camera helps to weaken the older idea of development as moral education and to promote a more passive idea according to which development consists of passing through the stages of life at the right time and in the right order. #Quote by Christopher Lasch

#53. I believe that a religious conversion is the only way to stimulate the peoples of the industrialized nations to be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of esho funi (the oneness of self and environment) ... I wish the entire world would accept as an item of religious faith the concept of esho funi and its moral obligations. #Quote by Arnold J. Toynbee

#54. Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards. #Quote by Joseph Sobran

#55. It is evident that most of what we think of as our medieval ancestors' barbaric practices were based on mistaken beliefs about how the laws of nature actually operate. If you - and everyone around you, including ecclesiastical and political authorities - truly believe that witches cause disease, crop failures, sickness, catastrophes, and accidents, then it is not only a rational act to burn witches, it is also a moral duty. This is what Voltaire meant when he wrote that people who believe absurdities are more likely to commit atrocities. #Quote by Michael Shermer

#56. There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong - deadly wrong - to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. #Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

#57. But will this attention to poverty be sustained or transient? That depends on our leaders - whether we step up and sustain our moral commitment as the country's conscience would naturally want us to do. #Quote by John Edward

#58. Some persons hold that, while it is proper for the lawgiver to encourage and exhort men to virtue on moral grounds, in the expectation that those who have had a virtuous moral upbringing will respond, yet he is bound to impose chastisement and penalties on the disobedient and ill-conditioned, and to banish the incorrigible out of the state altogether. For (they argue) although the virtuous man, who guides his life by moral ideals, will be obedient to reason, the base, whose desires are fixed on pleasure, must be chastised by pain, like a beast of burden. #Quote by Aristotle.

#59. In looking back now, I see how it began in my childhood, altho' I was not conscious of the necessity until '67 or '68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end ... So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing. #Quote by Alice James

#60. Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture. Many people have little or no knowledge of scripture at all. Many others who have more knowledge choose to interpret what they know in ways that are convenient, or that fit their own moral sense of what is good. Still others view their religion as a kind of self-accepted ethnicity, but live lives utterly divorced from any sense of faith. #Quote by Mohsin Hamid

#61. We are saved not by what we can do or accomplish but by our fealty to revolt, our steadfastness to the weak, the poor, the marginalized, and those who endure oppression. We must stand with them against the powerful. If we remain true to these moral imperatives, we win. And I am enough of an idealist to believe that the struggle to live the moral life is worth it. Chris Hedges, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress #Quote by Amy Friedman

#62. I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers - whether it be a Lawrence Krauss thinking that physics is rendering philosophy obsolete or a Sam Harris thinking that neuroscience is rendering moral philosophy obsolete - that it takes an awful lot of philosophy - philosophy of science in the first case, moral philosophy in the second - even to demonstrate the relevance of these empirical sciences. #Quote by Rebecca Goldstein

#63. We cannot confront solitude without moral resources. #Quote by Honore De Balzac