"Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions." - Will Durant

"Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them." - Mark Twain

"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." - Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900)

"The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation." - JEREMY BENTHAM, The Commonplace Book

"Let's find out what everyone is doing,
And then stop everyone from doing it."
- A.P. HERBERT, Let's Stop Somebody from Doing Something!

"An ethical person ought to do more than he's required to do and less than he's allowed to do." - MICHAEL JOSEPHSON, quoted in Bill Moyers' World of Ideas

"Morality is not really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy but of how we are to be worthy of happiness." - IMMANUEL KANT, Critique of Practical Reason

"There is . . . but one categorical imperative, namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." - IMMANUEL KANT, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

"It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly." - MARGARET MEAD, in Redbook Puritanism

"The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." - H.L. MENCKEN, A Mencken Chrestomathy

"Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual." - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Joyful Wisdom

"There are no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena." - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil

"As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral." - MARCEL PROUST, Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove

"It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them." - ADLAI E. STEVENSON, speech (1952)

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong." - ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Across the Plains

"All those men have their price." - ROBERT WALPOLE, quoted in William Coxe's Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole