All Quotes

"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."

"Morality has always had a difficult time of it; utility and legality even begrudge the fact of its existence."

"People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality."

"We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You've got to learn to behave like a duchess."

"If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation."

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people."

"I always thought dancing improper; but it can't be since I myself am dancing."

"Es stände besser um die Welt, wenn die Mühe, die man sich gibt, die subtilsten Moralgesetze auszuklügeln, zur Ausübung der einfachsten angewendet würde."

"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."

"He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to the ."

"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!"

"You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts; for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God."

"Bad company ruins good morals."

"Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious."

"No mere man since the Fall, is able in this life perfectly to keep the Commandments."

"Rough Johnson, the great moralist."

"The Bearings of this observation lays in the application on it."

"The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line."

"Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties."

"Dr. Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak."

"Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu."

"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."

"I find the doctors and the sages Have differ'd in all climes and ages, And two in fifty scarce agree On what is pure morality."

"For what end shall we be connected with men, of whom this is the character and conduct?… Is it, that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured; speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, and the lothing of God and man?"

"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality."

"I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world."

"Even in war moral power is to physical as three parts out of four."

"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That 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."

"Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be."

"It is improper, to expressly pursue the Urlinie in performance and to single out its tones...for the purpose of communicating the Urlinie to the listener." Rather, "for the performer, the Urlinie provides, first of all, a sense of direction. It serves a somewhat equivalent function to that which a road map serves for a mountain climber."

"Music was destined to reach its culmination in the likeness of itself."

"I would say the time has not yet come. I rebel against the present, whenever it is, because I have not seen any change, other than oppositions grow stronger. I would be a communist if it was more anarchist. Otherwise, I see only everything as an absurdity, so I can laugh and cry. I have lived in a continuation, from birth and growing towards death in a chain that cannot end. I don't see this decade then that decade. The same things happen in different guises. I am bohemian but at one time you would call me a hippie or a punk. I remain a bohemian whatever you call me. So maybe I am locked in the fifties. But I have never desired to grow up from my world as a child, which is when things are most clear and utopian. They are clear because you are at the center and you see all around you. When you get older you lose your sight … I lost something of my childishness when people around me start dying. Four of my family died within a year."

"I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big may have happened for me."

"You could say it like was like a fairy tale at the time; Andy would be the good fairy, and Jim would play the giant, Brian would be the witch, Paul McCartney would be the frog who turns into a prince, no, it would have to be the other way round. Well, it didn't seem like a fairy tale at the time. It was a lot of hassle. But I learned a lot of things, and I began to compose my own songs."

"I think he was the first man I met who was not afraid of me in some way. We were very similar, like brother and sister. Our spirits are similar. We were the same height and the same age, almost … He was well read and he introduced me to William Blake and also the English Romantic poets who came after him. Jim liked Shelley. I preferred Coleridge. In fact, he is my favoured poet of all time. Did you know they were all drug addicts? Coleridge was addicted to opium. It is better to be addicted to opium than to be addicted to money."

"Jim Morrison tells me that people are looking at the streets while I am looking at the moon. I do not feel connected enough [with the issues] to throw stones at a policeman. I want to throw stones at the whole world."

"I don't have a sense of time. Time is timeless to me, and I'm not in a hurry to get older. I mean, if I were worried about time, all the time, it would be terrible."

"Cease to know or to tellOr to see or to be your ownHave someone else's will as your ownHave someone else's will as your own."

"You are beautiful and you are alone."

"Often the adolescent plagueReward your graceConfuse your hunger capture the fake..."

"Banish the faceless reward your graceBanish the faceless reward your grace."

"He came your way And when he had to go There were roses growing in the snow Silently you'll go to the shadow of your soul And you know that it was like this before we had to go You will never see these lights Glowing in your nights Until you feel this way."

"With every moon it is as though you're getting closer to your soul And then you go alone and with no fear Then you will know That it was like this before we had to go And you will find that you were blind Until you saw these lights glowing in your nights."

"You will never see these lightsGlowing in your nights If you don't know And there are roses growing in the snow."

"John Cale did a really interesting version of Heartbreak Hotel, in a minor key. It's incredibly suicidal. I mean you could never believe that that song could turn out to be such a downer as that... Nico did Deutschland Über Alles, which was very good... and she did The End by The Doors, which is the one they put on the album... Nico doing The End was so chilling, it really was. It was incredible. She invests it with so many levels of meaning I didn't hear in the Doors' one. She underplays it... there's just the harmonium, me playing synthesizer— almost doubling the harmonium part— and her singing... which is just like a rich, kind of non-specific miasma of sound..."

"Of course, it's her own sexuality that she's denying", he continued. Did I know that she'd been raped as a teenager in Berlin? I didn't. Nico was working as a temp for the U.S. Air Force. A black American Sergeant had raped not only her, but other girls under his employ. She'd kept quiet about it, but he was found out and court-marshalled. She had to testify for the prosecution at his trial. He was sentenced to death and shot. Nico was 15. "Not only does she have to carry the horror of the rape but the secret guilt of somehow being complicit, by her testimony, in his execution. Sex for Nico....is irrevocably associated with punishment."

"Here is the brutal truth that no one dares to mention: We’re too few because too many of our babies have been killed. Over 45 million since Roe v. Wade in 1973.” "If those 45 million children had lived, today they would be defending our country, they would be filling our jobs, they would be paying into Social Security. Still, we watch as 3,700 babies are killed every single day in America. It is unbelievable that a nation under God would allow this."

"Lyndon Johnson is a Southerner who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage|mess of dark pottage."

"I know what Dan Quayle means when he says it's best for children to have two parents. You bet it is! And it would be nice for them to have trust funds, too. We can't all be born rich and handsome and lucky. And that's why we have a Democratic Party. My family would still be isolated and destitute if we had not had F.D.R.'s Democratic brand of government. I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation. I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because John Kennedy's rising tide lifted even our tiny boat. I made it because Lyndon Johnson showed America that people who were born poor didn't have to die poor. And I made it because a man with whom I served in the Georgia Senate, a man named Jimmy Carter, brought honesty and decency and integrity to public service. ."

"I say bomb the hell out of them. If there's collateral damage, so be it. They certainly found our civilians to be expendable."