The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment.We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

-Havel,Va¤  clav
  Speech,1  Jan.

The Frenchhad a moremartial air thanthe English.There seemed to be a species of military instinct in all classes. No young man appeared to have finished his education till after a bloody campaign† They were at this singular period, without the least exaggeration, a century behind us in notions of legal and moral responsibility.

-Haydon, Benjamin Robert
Autobiography (published1847).

   About morals,I know only that what ismoral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

-Hemingway, Ernest Millar
  Death in the Afternoon, ch.1.

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

-Huxley, Aldous Leonard
Grey Eminence, ch.10.

The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.

-Ignatieff, Michael
  'Is Nothing Sacred?  The Ethics of  Television', in Daedalus: Journal of the American  Academy of  Arts and Sciences, Fall.

Zwei Dinge erfu«  llen das Gemu« t  mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je  o« fter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit besch a« ftigt: der bestirnte Himmel u«  ber mir, unddas moralische Gesetz in mir. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within.

-Kant, Immanuel
  Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason) (translated by T K  Abbott).

The League of Nations grows in moral courage. Its frown will soon be more dreaded than a nation's arms, and when that happens, you and I shall have securityand peace.

-Macdonald, (James) Ramsay
  Speech, London, 9 Nov.

There is a growing division in our comparatively prosperous society between the South and the North and Midlands, which are ailing, that cannot be allowed to continue. There is a general sense of tension. The old English way might be to quarrel and have battles, but they were friendly. I can only describe as wicked the hatred that has been introduced, and which is to be found among different types of people today. Not merelyan intellectual but a moral effort isrequired toget rid of it.

-Stockton
  Maiden speech as the Earl of Stockton (60 years after first entering the House of Commons), House of Lords,13 Nov.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

-Mailer, Norman Kingsley
  'Hip, Hell, and The Navigator', in Western Review, no.23, Winter.

All the immediate checks to populationöseem to be resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery.

-Malthus,Thomas Robert
  An Essay on the Principle of Population.

We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.

-Marinetti, Emilio FilippoTomasso
  Manifesto of Futurism. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith Italy:  A Modern History (1959), p.270.

The government and the people are under a moral necessity of acting together; a free press compels them to bend to one another.

-Mill,James
  In the Edinburgh Review, May^ Aug.

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

-Mill,John Stuart
 Principles of Political Economy, with Some Applications to Social Philosophy.

Why have women Passion, intellect, moral activityöthese threeöand a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?

-Nightingale, Florence
  'Cassandra' pt.1, part of an unpublished work  Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth (revised and privately printed1859). Published as an appendix in Ray Strachey The Cause:  A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain (1928).

There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na|«ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na|«ve than some of the limited objectives he has now.

-O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery
  'Some  Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction'. Paper read at  Wesleyan College, Fall.

A story with a moral appended is like the bite of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

-O Henry pseudonym of  William Sydney Porter
  Strictly Business,'The Gold That Glittered'.

When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him; you must show him in the streets of the town; you must show him in the fair and the market place; and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely aloneöby putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating himfromhiskindasif hewerea leperofold.You must show himyourdetestationofthe crimesthat hehas committed.

-Parnell, Charles Stewart
  Speech that established the practice of boycotting, Ennis, 19 Sep.

Asthe strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.

-Poe, EdgarAllan
  Of detective work.'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', in the Gentleman's Magazine, Apr.

Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit.

-Pope, Alexander
  Imitations of Horace, bk.2, epistle1, l.75^6.

On devient moral de'  s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.

-Proust, Marcel
  A la recherche du temps perdu,'A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs'.