Topic: Morality, Matches 55 quotes.

Believe it or not, at one time the very notion of government had less to do with politics than with virtue. According to James Madison, often referred to as the father of the Constitution: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of the government far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” (Russ Walton, Biblical Principles of Importance to Godly Christians [New Hampshire: Plymouth Foundation, 1984], p. 361.)

George Washington agreed with his colleague James Madison. Said Washington: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle” (James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, published by authority of Congress, 1899, vol. 1, p. 220).

Nearly a hundred years later, Abraham Lincoln responded to a question about which side God was on during the Civil War with his profound insight: “I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.” (Abraham Lincoln’s Stories and Speeches, J. B. McClure, ed. [Chicago: Rhodes and McClure Publishing Co., 1896], pp. 185-86.)

Madison, Washington, and Lincoln all understood that democracy cannot possibly flourish in a moral vacuum, and that organized religion plays an important role in preserving and maintaining public morality. Indeed, John Adams, another of America’s founding fathers, insisted: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion” (John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles E Adams, ed., 1854).

Source: Elder M. Russell Ballard
Address given 5 July 1992 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Government, Purpose; Morality; Virtue

In “America the Beautiful” we also sing about establishing a “thoroughfare of freedom.” Many of our streets, instead of being a “thoroughfare of freedom,” are unsafe. Ironically, drugs and pornography often have staked out their own well-worn “thoroughfares” or corridors, and “free” zones. Surely it is one of the first duties of government to protect its citizens. Nevertheless, however beefed up, law enforcement cannot realistically be expected to compensate fully for widespread lack of individual self-control.

We rightly sing about how a “good” America should be crowned “with brotherhood.” But instead of increasing brotherhood there is increasing separatism. There is even rising racism. Among our citizens there is also decreasing respect for each other. Engulfing gangs remind us soberingly of failing families and neighborhoods.

We sing, too, about how our “alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.” Yet our cities don’t gleam. Many are decaying, covered with graffiti. They are dimmed with human tears of desperation by those who feel left out of the American dream.

Source: Neal A. Maxwell
Address given 4 July 1993 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Freedom, Loss of; Morality; Responsibility

Earlier, in his first inaugural, Washington said: “There exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness . . . we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”

Significantly, the Senate replied to Washington’s Inaugural, saying: “We feel, sir, the force and acknowledge the justness of the observation that the foundations of our national policy should be lain in private morality. If individuals be not influenced by moral principles, it is in vain to look for public virtue.” (Thomas G. West, “The Rule of Law in the Federalist,” in Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding, ed. Charles R. Kesler [New York: The Free Press, 1987], 166-67.)

Source: Neal A. Maxwell
Address given 4 July 1993 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Morality; Virtue

There is a widespread feeling that the honored values of this nation are eroding and must be re-enthroned. When someone in good conscience tries to say this, invariably someone else raises the voice, “Whose values?” My answer to that is, everybody’s values: time-honored values such as absolute honesty, complete integrity, decency and civility, marriage, independence, industry, thrift, self-reliance, respect for law and order, and hard work. These are human values.

I do not wish to be a voice of doom. I wish to be a voice of confidence and hope in our country. The United States, with all of its challenges and problems, is still the greatest haven of opportunity in the world. Our government has never been more greatly challenged to defend its borders from people from other countries who wish to live here and enjoy the freedoms and opportunities this country affords. The desirability of this country will persist so long as its citizenry are a God-fearing people with the integrity to obey the law of the land. This includes the laws we do not like as well as the laws we do like.

There are natural safeguards in a God-fearing people that promote respect for law and order, decency, and public civility. That restraining influence is the belief that the citizenry will be accountable to their Creator for their conduct under a high moral law. This respect for and adherence to moral law transcends the constraints of the civil and criminal codes. In a people who are not God-fearing, however, these characteristics are notably absent.

Will public civility be lost under the guise of claiming under Constitutional safeguards the rights to freedom of speech? Will tolerance of other faiths and beliefs continue to be diminished by claiming rights under the establishment and free exercise clauses of the Constitution?

Source: James E. Faust
Address given 2 July 1995 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Morality

As piety, religion and morality have a happy influence on the minds of men, in their public as well as private transactions, you will not think it unseasonable . . . to bring to your remembrance the great importance of encouraging our university, town schools, and other seminaries of education, that our children and youth while they are engaged in the pursuit of useful science, may have their minds impressed with a strong sense of the duties they owe to their God, their instructions, and each other, so that when they arrive to a state of manhood, and take a part in any public transactions, their hearts having been deeply impressed in the course of their education with the moral feelings—such feelings may continue and have their due weight through the whole of their future lives.

Source: Samuel Adams

Topics: Morality; Virtue

Still, the great question remained: were these American people in this new American nation really capable of fulfilling their personal, ethical, private as well as public responsibilities, especially as they believed them to be God-given responsibilities?

Through their knowledge of history, their commitment to the moral values and traditions in which they believed, and through their own experience, the American founding fathers knew that a morally corrupt people could never enjoy the luxury of freedom. Their teacher, the great English philosopher, Edmund Burke, had said it best:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites [May I repeat that: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites.”] . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”16

16. Edmund Burke, The Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 4 (Waltham, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1866), pp. 51-52.

Source: Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
Address given 30 June 1996 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: America, Heritage; Morality

Among the most important terms used in this new language of the Republic were “moral sense” and “virtue.” Thomas Jefferson, for example, believed that if moral sense and personal virtue had not been God-given within the human being, then the building of any republic—especially the one we enjoy today—would simply have been impossible.

According to Jefferson, “passions and appetites are parts of human nature,” but so are “reason and moral sense.“17 “It would have been inconsistent [by God] in [the very act of] creation,” he insisted, “to have found man for [life in a] social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of [that] society.“18 “I believe that it is instinct[ive], and innate, that the moral sense is as much a part of our [personal] constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing. A wise Creator must have seen [this as] necessary in [a being] destined to live [together] in society.“19

17. C. E Adams, Writings of John Adams, vol. 6, p. 115.

18. Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 388.

19. Ibid., p. 492.

Source: Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
Address given 30 June 1996 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Morality; Virtue

Clearly the key to true liberty lay in the human heart, and today that means our hearts—yours and mine and our children and our childrens’ children—as well as those of Pilgrims, Puritans, and the original founding fathers.

As Alexander Hamilton said so beautifully: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments and musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, [upon the soul of man.] . . . The Supreme Being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beautifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by which he could discern and pursue such things as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty and personal safety.“29

So America was founded on principles of personal virtue and private morality that would give meaning and vitality to those more technical political principles of constitutional government with its executive, legislative, and judicial branches of activity. Undergirding all of this was the commitment of the individual citizen as well as that of the elected official. From such a personal devotion would come the determination to live together in peace and liberty and safety and freedom. These are blessings we want for ourselves, our children, our neighborhoods, and our world. They are very much the blessings for which this nation was settled and for which that initial War of Independence was fought.

29. Alexander Hamilton, “The Farmer Refuted,” (February, 1775); John C. Hamilton, ed., The Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 2 (New York: Charles S. Francis, 1851), p. 80.

Source: Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
Address given 30 June 1996 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: America, Heritage; Morality

In the sincere observances of the principles of true religion and virtue, we recognize the base, the only sure foundation of enlightened society and well-established government.

Source: Brigham Young
JD 2:178.

Topics: Morality; Virtue

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