935 – “What can only be taught by the rod and with blows will not lead to much good; they will not remain pious any longer than the rod is behind them.”

-Martin Luther

931 – Robert Heinlein on Patriotism

“The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called ‘patriotism.’
Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind. The door they opened leads to the hope that H. sapiens will survive indefinitely long, even longer than this solid planet on which we stand tonight. As a direct result of what they did, it is now possible that the human race will never die.
Many short-sighted fools think that going to the Moon was just a stunt. But the astronauts knew the meaning of what they were doing, as is shown by Neil Armstrong’s first words in stepping down onto the soil of Luna: ‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.'”

-Robert Heinlein

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928 – “All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the west has no moral authority.”

-James Baldwin

875 – “My father had a favorite: saying: ‘Whoever does not talk to his father never knows what his grandfather said.’ He was trying to express the linear quality or wisdom. His morality was not something that he made up on his own; it had been given to him by his own father and his grandfather before that, a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis stretching back hundreds of years to the time out of memory when our people had migrated to this hilly triangle between lakes.”

–Paul Rusesabagina

Today is Father’s Day, if you have the chance visit or speak to your father today.

“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process. In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”

–Wangari Maathai

541 – “The thought system that dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years we may have worked for power, money and prestige. Now all of a sudden we’ve learned that those are just the values of a dying world.”

–Marianne Williamson

435 – “You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy and sympathy, not religion.”

–anonymous

333 – “Christian, if you cannot say definitively, no matter what, that adults creeping on teenage girls is wrong, do not tell me how you stand against moral relativism.”

–Russell Moore, President of the ERLC of the Southern Baptist Convention

Note: Russell Moore tweeted this to Roy Moore (no relation that I am aware of) supporters in Alabama, pointing out the hypocrisy of supporting a political candidate accused of immoral acts, while claiming to follow a morality set out by your religion.

252 – “It’s okay to dislike someone, or even to dislike someone for no reason. But it is not okay to disrespect, degrade, or humiliate that person.”

–anonymous

245 – “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

–Assata Shakur