Download Abraham Lincoln:

Abraham Lincoln:
When I do good, I feel good; when I
do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.
Buddha:
Neither fire nor wind, birth nor
death can erase our good deeds.
Charlotte Bronte:
Conventionality is not morality.
Albert Einstein:
A man's ethical behavior should be
based effectually on sympathy,
education, and social ties; no religious
basis is necessary. Man would indeed
be in a poor way if he had to be
restrained by fear of punishment and
hope of reward after death.
Albert Schweitzer:
Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence
for life. This is what gives me the
fundamental principle of morality,
namely, that good consists in
maintaining, promoting, and
enhancing life, and that destroying,
injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Civilization and Ethics, 1949
Arthur Dobrin:
A Humanist Code of Ethics:
Do no harm to the earth, she is your
mother.
Being is more important than having.
Never promote yourself at another's
expense.
Hold life sacred; treat it with
reverence.
Allow each person the dignity of his
or her labor.
Barbara Jordan:
All my growth and development led
me to believe that if you really do the
right thing, and if you play by the rules,
and if you've got good enough, solid
judgment and common sense, that
you're going to be able to do whatever
you want to do with your life.
Barry Lopez:
How is one to live a moral and compassionate
existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the
horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not
only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a
stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it
must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and
accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of
such paradox. One must live in the middle of
contradiction, because if all contradiction were
eliminated at once life would collapse. There are
simply no answers to some of the great pressing
questions. You continue to live them out, making your
life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams
Cicero:
Gratitude is not only the greatest of
virtues, but the parent of all the others.
Denis Diderot:
There is no moral precept that does
not have something inconvenient about
it.
Edwin Markham:
We have committed the Golden Rule
to memory; let us now commit it to life
Dorothy Rowe:
We would like to believe that we are
not in the business of surviving but in
being good, and we do not like to admit
to ourselves that we are good in order
to survive.
Edward Ericson:
The cosmos is neither moral or immoral; only
people are. He who would move the world must
first move himself.
Felix Adler:
To care for anyone else enough to make their
problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's
real ethical development.
Elie Wiesel:
I have learned two lessons in my life:
first, there are no sufficient literary,
psychological, or historical answers to
human tragedy, only moral ones.
Second, just as despair can come to one
another only from other human beings,
hope, too, can be given to one only by
other human beings.
Eric Hoffer:
The remarkable thing is that we
really love our neighbor as ourselves:
we do unto others as we do unto
ourselves. We hate others when we
hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward
others when we tolerate ourselves. We
forgive others when we forgive
ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice
others when we are ready to sacrifice
ourselves.
Felix Adler:
Ethical religion can be real only to
those who are engaged in ceaseless
efforts at moral improvement. By
moving upward we acquire faith in an
upward movement, without limit.
Isaac Asimov:
Never let your sense of morals get in
the way of doing what's right.
Henry David Thoreau:
Do not be too moral. You may cheat
yourself out of much life so. Aim above
morality. Be not simply good, be good
for something.
HH the Dalai Lama:
Consider the following. We humans
are social beings. We come into the
world as the result of others' actions.
We survive here in dependence on
others. Whether we like it or not, there
is hardly a moment of our lives when
we do not benefit from others'
activities. For this reason it is hardly
surprising that most of our happiness
arises in the context of our
relationships with others.
Heinz Pagels:
Science cannot resolve moral
conflicts, but it can help to more
accurately frame the debates about
those conflicts. The Dreams of Reason,
1988
Isocrates:
The noblest worship is to make
yourself as good and as just as you can.
Hierocles:
We ought always to deal justly, not
only with those who are just to us, but
likewise to those who endeavor to
injure us; and this, for fear lest by
rendering them evil for evil, we should
fall into the same vice.
Jane Addams:
Action indeed is the sole medium of
expression for ethics.
John Burroughs:
Nature teaches more than she
preaches. There are no sermons in
stones. It is easier to get a spark out of
a stone than a moral.
Mark Twain:
Always do right--this will gratify
some and astonish the rest.
John Wesley:
Do all the good you can, by all the
means you can, in all the ways you can,
in all the places you can, at all the times
you can, to all the people you can, as
long as ever you can.
Marcus Aurelius:
If it is not right do not do it; if it is not
true do not say it.
Marie Ebner von Eschenbach:
Whenever two good people argue
over principles, they are both right.
Matthew Henry:
Goodness makes greatness truly
valuable, and greatness make goodness
much more serviceable.
Molleen Matsumura:
Reason guides our attempt to
understand the world about us. Both
reason and compassion guide our
efforts to apply that knowledge
ethically, to understand other people,
and have ethical relationships with
other people.
Noam Chomsky:
States are not moral agents, people
are, and can impose moral standards
on powerful institutions.
William Lloyd Garrison:
The success of any great moral
enterprise does not depend upon
numbers.
Omar N. Bradley:
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and
ethical infants. We know more about
war than we know about peace, more
about killing than we know about
living. We have grasped the mystery of
the atom and rejected the Sermon on
the Mount.
Origen:
The power of choosing good and evil
is within the reach of all.
Paul Ricoeur:
The moral law commands us to make
the highest possible good in a world the
final object of all our conduct.
Pearl S. Buck:
You cannot make yourself feel
something you do not feel, but you can
make yourself do right in spite of your
feelings.
Plato:
Good people do not need laws to tell
them to act responsibly, while bad
people will find a way around the laws.
Rabindranath Tagore:
He who is too busy doing good finds
no time to be good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it
is to serve, it is to think, it is to be
humble.
Robert Wright:
Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the
sense of justice -- all of these things, the things that hold
society together, the things that allow our species to think
so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a
firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is
that, although these things are in some ways blessings for
humanity as a whole, they didn't evolve for the "good of the
species" and aren't reliably employed to that end. Quite the
contrary: it is now clearer than ever (and precisely why)
the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility,
switched on and off in keeping with self interest; and how
naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the
new view, human beings are a species splendid in their
array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to
misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of
the misuse.
The Moral Animal
Shirley Chisholm:
When morality comes up against
profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
T. S. Eliot:
The highest form of treason: to do the
right thing for the wrong reason.
Murder in the Cathedral
Theodore Bikel:
All too often arrogance accompanies
strength, and we must never assume
that justice is on the side of the strong.
The use of power must always be
accompanied by moral choice.
Theodore Parker:
Look at the facts of the world. You
see a continual and progressive
triumph of the right. I do not pretend
to understand the moral universe; the
arc is a long one, my eye reaches but
little ways; I cannot calculate the curve
and complete the figure by the
experience of sight; I can divine it by
conscience. And from what I see I am
sure it bends towards justice. Things
refuse to be mismanaged long.
Thomas Paine:
A long habit of not thinking a thing
wrong gives it a superficial appearance
of being right.
W. H. Auden:
We are here on earth to do good for
others. What the others are here for, I
don't know.
Vaclav Havel:
Genuine politics -- even politics
worthy of the name -- the only politics I
am willing to devote myself to -- is
simply a matter of serving those
around us: serving the community and
serving those who will come after us.
Its deepest roots are moral because it is
a responsibility expressed through
action, to and for the whole.
William Channing Gannett:
Ethics thought out is religious
thought; ethics felt out is religious
feeling, and ethics lived out is the
religious life.
William Penn:
To do evil that good may come of it is
for bunglers in politics as well as
morals.
William J. H. Boetcker:
That you may retain your selfrespect, it is better to displease the
people by doing what you know is right,
than to temporarily please them by
doing what you know is wrong.