The pure, the bright, The beautiful that stirred our hearts in youth, The impulses to wordless prayer, The streams of love and truth, The longing after something lost, The spirit's yearning cry, The striving after better hopes; These things can never die. The timid hand stretched forth to aid a brother in his need, A kindly word in grief's dark hour that proves a friend indeed; The plea for mercy softly breathed, When justice threatens high, The sorrow of a contrite heart; These things shall never die, shall never die. Let nothing pass, For every hand must find some work to do, Lose not a chance to waken love. Be firm and just and true, So shall a light that cannot fade beam on thee from on high, And angel voices say to thee; These things can never die.
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If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
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The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
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Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
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On the view of earth from 3.7 billion miles away: 'Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home, That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [...] There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'
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In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
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First the grub, then the morals.
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Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
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...a sword never kills anybody it's a tool in the killer's hand. From Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, Letters to Lucilius on Morals, Letter 87, c.63-65
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It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.
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We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
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Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
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Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.
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Without a doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.
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There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
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Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.
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Satan isn't anything to believe in but there are people running things whose God is Lucifer. Check out the Lucifierian Doctrine which Albert Pike wrote. He said it is given to 29th-33rd rank Masons in his book Morals and Dogma.
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Might was the measure of right.
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English coarseness is well known. The Gaures, on the contrary, are the gentlest of men. All savages are cruel, and it is not their morals that urge them to be so; this cruelty proceeds from their food. They go to war as to the chase, and treat men as they do bears. Even in England the butchers are not received as legal witnesses any more than surgeons. And great criminals harden themselves to murder by drinking [animal] blood.
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You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
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I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.
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He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.
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Roast Beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entr?es, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things ? la though you know that Roast Beef, medium, is safe and sane, and sure.
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From 4 to 6 percent of the presidential office is not in administration but in morals, politics, and spiritual leadership . He has to guide a people in the greatest adventure ever undertaken on the planet.
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A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
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Life was a colorful painful pageant to her, in which right and wrong were wobbly yardsticks. Values and morals varied with time and place. Sweeping righteous views, like Victor Henry's Christian morality and Rule's militant socialism, tended to cause much hell and to cramp what little happiness there was to be had. So she thought.
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I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.
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Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance.
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The terrible immoralities are the cunning ones hiding behind masks of morality, such as exploiting people while pretending to help them.
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