Moral Dilemma Quotes

“Holy Christ, people, we’ve accidentally done what we sold to the public.”
― Joseph A. Anderson, Eden 2:b

“If you’re drowning and a murderer throws you a line, you can’t wait for someone more agreeable to come along.”
― Steve Shahbazian, Green and Pleasant Land

“Oppenheimer, haunted by his leading role in the first use of atomic weapons, understood only one aspect of prudence. His longing not to do evil himself blinded him to the need to ward off the evil of others. This painfully knotted man hoped with one swipe of his moral sword to rid himself of the impossible tangle and to be clear and simple for once in his life. But being Oppenheimer could never be as easy as that.

For Oppenheimer embodied two of the highest human types, the theoretical man described by Aristotle as god-like for living in the mind, among changeless truths, and the paragon of Machiavellian virtue, god-like in commanding the power of life and death over other men. No theoretical man before Oppenheimer had known such lordly power. In certain high moments he approached that Aristotelian theoretical purity which lives for the joys of knowing the world, whatever it might prove to be; in another light he thrilled at that Machiavellian power and its attendant renown; in contrary moods he reviled himself for the suffering he brought into the world, and ached to renounce his distinction and to be merely another man among men. Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one’s mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. Oppenheimer’s agony tore him open from top to bottom.”
― Algis Valiunas

“Good and evil are not compatible. The wars we see in the world are a devastating reflection of the wars within most people.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“But here am I, riding this steel behemoth – the most ominous killing machine ever conceived; a weapon of war with the innocuous name of carrier. It transports our crew and air wing personnel to the Oriental dens of sin. It takes us to the blood-soaked terrain of the Vietnamese. It is, in a single thought, one of the most obscene but amazingly brilliant products of human ingenuity.”
― Gerald Maclennon, God, Bombs & Viet Nam: Based on the Diary of a 20-Year-Old Navy Enlisted Man in the Vietnam Air War - 1967

“Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one’s mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal.”
― Algis Valiunas

“The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.”
― Algis Valiunas

“[Father Aberforth]: “...Have you figured out what you’re going to do with this married man of yours?” ... “I’m not here to judge you, girl. You think you’re the first sheep to wander out of the fold because greener pastures beckon?” He reached for his tea. “At least you show some originality. Most priests who dabble in adultery go for the music director or one of the warden’s wives. The town’s chief of police—that’s novel. Not too bright, but novel.”
― Julia Spencer-Fleming, All Mortal Flesh

“We are both of us torn by the weight of knowing all these people cannot possibly be witches. If we speak in their defense, we become accused. If we say nothing, we condemn them falsely with our silence. What would God have us do?”
― Susan Meissner, The Shape of Mercy

“The reality is that to do what is right, you have to do some little wrongs.”
― T.W. Lawless

“Considerable educational effort has now and again been made to develop in students the ability to reason their ways through complex moral dilemmas, and to formulate morally enlightened choices as a result. But there is no evidence that, once having acquired such moral reasoning skills, these students will behave any better than their morally untutored peers when it comes to the willingness of the great human majority, when circumstance are “right,” to engage in state-authorized aggression and killing in wars, participation in judicial executions, perpetration of school and adult bullying, domestic abuse, endorsement of torture in the name of national security, depredation of the world's natural resources and biodiversity in the interests of human development and financial gain—a list that could be continued at some length. The moral bridge is a bridge that relatively few cross automatically and naturally, from morally reasoned judgement to moral conduct.”
― Steven James Bartlett, Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.”
― Susan Liautaud, The Power of Ethics: How to Make Good Choices in a Complicated World

“A whisper can be louder than a scream if you know how to listen.”
― Tiffany Higgins, What Happened to the Oranges?: Fifteen Literary Short Stories of Quiet Defiance, Surrealism, and Moral Dilemmas