“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.”

“Persuasive influences are better than any amount of moralizing.”

“A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.”

“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.”

“The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty.”

“It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.”