The threat to morale comes not from the orientation of a few, but from the closed minds of the many.

-Robb, Charles S(pittal)
  On gays in the military. In the NewYorkTimes, 5 Feb.

The moral of all this†is that we have the kind of advertising we deserve.

-Sayers, Dorothy L(eigh)
  'The Psychology of Advertising', in The Spectator,19 Nov.

A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

-Shaw, George Bernard
 Of Caesar. Caesar and Cleopatra, notes.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  The Devil. Man and Superman, act 3.

But from the first 'twas Peter's drift To be a kind of moral eunuch, He touched the hem of Nature's shift, Felt faintöand never dared uplift The closest, all-concealing tunic.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'Peter Bell theThird', pt.4, stanza11.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetryadministers to the effect byacting on the cause.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
A Defence of Poetry.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

-Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich
  Quoted in the Observer, 29 Dec.

No one can be perfectly free until all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

-Spencer, Herbert
Social Statics, pt.4, ch.30, section16.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

-Stein, Gertrude
  'Q.E.D.', bk.1. Collected in Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings (1971).

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
Virginibus Puerisque,'Virginibus Puerisque', pt.1.

We want a society in which we are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. That is what we mean by a moral societyönot a society in which the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.

-Thatcher, Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness
  Speech, Zurich University,14 Mar.

He was the type of man who was always trying to live beyond his moral means.

-Toynbee, (Theodore) Philip
  Of J Middleton Murry. In the Observer,12 Jan.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

-Twain, Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens
  TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn,'Notice'.

I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le¤  vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

-van den Berghe, Pierre L
'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed) Authors of their Own Lives (1990).

   There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joyand that it is this which will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

-Walker, Alice Malsenior
  Possessing the Secret ofJoy, epigraph.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

-Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge)
  TheWife of Sir Isaac Harman, ch.9.

   The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
The Picture of Dorian Gray, preface.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
The Picture of Dorian Gray, preface.

The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.

-Wilson of Rievaulx, (James) Harold Wilson, Baron
  Scottish Labour Party conference, 5 Sep.