Quotes About Values

Odd characters, my dear, are needful to make even characters shine. You good girls would not be valued as you are, if there were not bad ones.

Simple honesty of purpose in a man goes a long way in life, if founded on a just estimate of himself and a steady obedience to the rule he knows and feels to be right.

Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one.

From something as simple as what goes in to a good meatloaf to the not so simple - religion, culture, how you should vote, every damn thing you think or believe, your reactions, your behavior - were partially shaped by who and what your parents were.

The things a man hoarded revealed a lot about the man and what he valued.

That explains the United States Constitution's hard-and-fast rule against accepting any item of value from a government official or his or her agent.

what you have to decide, is how you want your life to be. if your forever was ending tomorrow, would this b the way you'd want to have spent it?

If you were dead, Owen told her, you'd have bigger problems than what you were wearing.

Just because someone's pretty, doesn't mean she's decent.

But she did believe that the fundamentals of most people remained the same throughout their lifetimes. People who were generous usually remained generous, unless life taught them not to be. And people who saw the world through the prism of their own needs first and foremost would always be that way.

If a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? If we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair.

The thing about a country famous for its bribery is that the people who don't take bribes are very keen you know that about them.

The lesson of an American life like my father's... is that achievements are compatible with decency (112).

A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness--Truth, Knowers, the Good, Man--but we can by no means deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about values.

It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness. Nice girls marry for love. But should they fall out of love, they must be free to love another. No decent husband will oppose the heart.

A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution

When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral.

Ethics are important because they give direction to people and societies who have some sense that they cannot flourish without being moral.

Morality is primarily concerned with questions of right and wrong, the ability to distinguish between the two, and the justification of the distinction.

normative ethics refers to the discipline that produces moral norms or rules as its end product.

aretaic ethics is a category of ethics that focuses on the virtues produced in individuals, not the morality of specific acts.

Ethical systems may be classified as either action-oriented systems or virtue-based systems. Under these two major divisions are three subcategories by which ethical systems may be further classified: deontological systems, teleological systems, and relativism.

relativism refers to an ethical system in which right and wrong are not absolute and unchanging but relative to one's culture (cultural relativism) or one's own personal preferences (moral subjectivism).

With the current emphasis on multiculturalism and appreciation for the cultural diversity that exists in much of the world, and the importance of a culture's values in its self-definition, it should not surprise us that there is a movement toward accepting all cultures' values as equally valid, which is the definition of cultural relativism.