Moral Superiority Quotes

“You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.

But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“It is vital that we avoid any hint of moral superiority in our dealings with one another in the environmental movement; if it developed into factionalism it would destroy us, as factionalism has destroyed so many other progressive movements in America.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Like prison, I'm never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy - because here's the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy moral business, and feel like you are a better person.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“My parents joined the Communist Party but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the Left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The Left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the ‘root cause’ of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?

“Veganism needs a PR makeover. Most people think it's a nutty cult where, at initiation, new members receive the International Step of Moral Superiority from which they look down their noses at non-vegans.”
― Stewart Stafford

“He did not know why she pulled out the hair of the dead. Accordingly, he did not know whether her case was to be put down as good or bad. But in his eyes, pulling out the hair of the dead in the Rashomon on this stormy night was an unpardonable crime. Of course it never entered his mind that a little while ago he had though of becoming a thief”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories