Long Longford: self-appointed guardian of the country’s morals. The Lost World of the Seventies: A Report by Michael Cockerell, BBC 2012
Lord Longford – the great moral crusader of the decade. He was a contradictory character. An hereditary earl who identified with the outcasts of society. He made headlines in the seventies by visiting notorious criminals in prison and for his campaign against pornography. ibid.
When the Longford Report was published it recommended much stricter laws on pornography. The government ignored it. ibid.
Bush fumed in his diary, ‘This [Nixon] era of tawdry shabby lack of morality has got to end’. George H W Bush I, PBS 2008
Politics have no relation to morals. Niccolo Machiavelli
Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy? Copenhagen 2002 starring Stephen Rea & Daniel Craig & Francesca Annis et al, director Howard Davies, Werner Heisenberg to Bohr
Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view) consists of its attitudes towards those who are at its mercy: animals. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In September 2008 the Church of England issued a belated apology for its attack on Charles Darwin. Darwin hasn’t killed God: religious people have simply found different ways to justify their faith. Has he destroyed morality? Again, no. To understand the origin of morality doesn’t mean you must cast it aside. But Darwin has changed the terms of trade. He’s returned us to Nature. To its wonder, to its glory, and to its danger. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution questions almost everything we thought we knew about ourselves. Where we come from. Why we behave as we do. The origins of our morality. It isn’t comfortable and it isn’t easy but the more science looks at this theory, the truer it turns out to be. Man is the truth-seeking primate. Darwin has given us a great truth. And there is no going back. Andrew Marr, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, BBC 2009
The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental. Julian Baggini
We don’t need God to validate our moral beliefs. Jonathan Miller, The Atheism Tapes, Colin McGinn, BBC 2004
Most people will do what’s right. ibid.
Everyone’s got their own world compass that determines what they will and won’t do. Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics, Sky Atlantic 2010; viz also book
The death of dogma is the birth of morality. Immanuel Kant
Food first then morals. Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
Force always attracts men of low morality. Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
Mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep. John Keats, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, 1817
It’s time for our business and political leaders to help redefine morality beyond sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to include lying, hypocrisy, and callous indifference to those in need. Arianna Huffington
I’m as pure as the driven slush. Tallulah Bankhead, 1903-1968, cited Saturday Evening Post 12th April 1947
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, 1954
This damned morality will undo us all. Lord Melbourne, re Prince Albert
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. H G Wells
The whole world has a problem of moral pollution. Mary Whitehouse
Everything’s got a moral, if you can only find it. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a god, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of proposition, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but it is, however, of the last consequence. David Hume, A Treatise Upon Human Nature
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy. Marcel Proust 1918
We are instinctively moral beings, moral animals. Ian McEwan, interview Richard Dawkins
I feel that man has a moral obligation to not only his kind but actually to the world at large, the natural world at large. David Attenborough, televised interview
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. Thomas Babington Macaulay, essay Edinburgh Review, 1843
A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. Socrates
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. Steven Pinker
Conventionality is not morality. Charlotte Bronte
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something. Henry David Thoreau
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. Aleister Crowley
All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football. Albert Camus
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. Graham Greene
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis. Karl Kraus
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
All universal moral principles are idle fancies. Marquis de Sade
The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Particularly with teenagers because let’s face it they’re not as careful as say we would be. You know what I mean, they don’t think, do they? They’ve got a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, you know and they’re having a bit of a dance and the next thing you know it’s cigarette on your carpet and stubbed out. Play For Today: Abigail’s Party, written and directed Mike Leigh, starring Alison Steadman ***** Beverly to Sue, with Angela & Tony, BBC 1977
By the early sixties there were about five million teenagers. Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture II, BBC 2012
Then a new set of working class dandies emerged – the Mods ... Their main aim was to have a good time. They were energetic but frustrated too, and were looking for a way to say so. ibid.
They are anti-war, and they love everybody, and their sexual lives have become freer. The kids are looking for something else, or some different moral value. Mick Jagger, cited Arena: 1966 – Thirty Years Ago Today: The Year the Decade Exploded, BBC 2016, Mick Jagger
You know, we all have our inner demons. I, for one — I can’t speak for you, but I’m on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show. Glenn Beck, 6th November 2006
We don’t steal from people who can’t afford it. We don’t hurt people who don’t deserve it. Parker 2013 starring Jason Statham & Jennifer Lopez & Michael Chiklis & Wendell Pierce & Clifton Collins & Bobby Cannavale & Patti LuPone & Carlos Carrasco & Micah Hauptman & Emma Booth & Nick Nolte et al, director Taylor Hackford