The weakest man is the one who is able to correct his moral defects, but doesn't take action.
Ali ibn Abi Talib
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Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.
Hans Morgenthau
Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival.
Hans Morgenthau
Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.
Robert A. Heinlein
Ali ibn Abi Talib
Ali, Ahmed (politician)
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