Quotes About Values

Maybe there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down to what people are to people.

If you want to know what your true beliefs are- take a look at your actions.

I did on one or two occasions tell my students they were living in a society that valued people of their age, region, and class primarily as cannon fodder, cheap labor, and gullible consumers, and that education could give them some of the weapons necessary to fight back.

Reciprocity is certainly not a good basis for a morality of aspiration. Yet it is more than just the morality of egoism. It

Our core identity—the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us—is the ideals we share, the good we hold in common. If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of the common good.

As more windows shatter, other aspects of community life also start unraveling. The unspoken norm becomes: Do whatever you want here because everyone else is doing it.

Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn't even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent's attitudes. Parricide and incest ought not be. One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker.

All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them truly to believe in.

Do not seek dishonest gains; dishonest

Another important aspect of our home was respect for ideas.

Coca-Cola's former president William Robinson, who in 1959 told an audience at Fordham Law School that executives should not put stockholders first. They should "balance the interests of the stockholder, the community, the customer, and the employee.

The problem is that the choice we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as citizens. We might make different choices if we understood the social consequences of our purchases or investments and if we knew all other consumers and investors would join us in forbearing from certain great deals whose social consequence were abhorrent to us.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

The human soul aspires to higher things than the society columns of the New York Sunday papers, and the frivolous chatter of an overheated ballroom.

People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but—" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong.

The decision as to whether to risk one's actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is." from The structure of desire and recognition

You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.

Be careful of selfish motives. You can mistake them for principles and end up dying for them.

Every day ask yourself, "What would I do today if I were a better person?"

The trouble with selfish motives is that they harden into principles, and you end up sending your kids to war for them.

You must question a code of ethics that never impedes your progress.

If you teach your children nothing else, teach them the Golden Rule and "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey."