Quotes About Morality

Or, as W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

So if sumo wrestlers, schoolteachers, and day-care parents all cheat, are we to assume

W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

If morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work

When people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.

As pessoas não são boas ou más. As pessoas são pessoas e, como tal, reagem a incentivos. Quase sempre os indivíduos são manipuláveis - para o bem ou para o mal -, bastando, para tanto, encontrar as alavancas certas.

Each of us develops a moral compass (some stronger than others, to be sure) as we make our way through the world. This is for the most part a wonderful thing. Who wants to live in a world where people run around with no regard for the difference between right and wrong?

paid $2.50 to smother a baby girl born with a cleft deformity

If asked how we'd behave in a situation that pits a private benefit against the greater good, most of us won't admit to favoring the private benefit. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.

Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or

If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

Ante cualquier incentivo, cualquier situación, la gente deshonesta tratará de obtener un beneficio sin importar los medios a emplear.

Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation,dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary.

If it's okay to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn't we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets? Most of us don't think that's a good idea, and not just because it might backfire. We don't think it's a good idea because we believe human beings have human rights, whatever their colour and wherever they live. Stealing assets is wrong, and so is stealing the right to earn a living, no matter where the victim was born.

If you support protectionism because you think it's good for you, you've probably just got your economics wrong. But if you support protectionism because you think it's good for your fellow Americans, at the expense of foreigners, then it seems to me you've got your morals wrong too.

This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later.

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.

Oscar Wilde's prophecy that "as long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.

The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn't happen to them.

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.