Quotes About Ethics

True freedom is freedom from the illusion of morality, from the belief that there is good and evil. There is only power, Mr. Mason.

Noah, Noah," Monique said. "Crime is nothing. Crime is something that will always be a part of society.

One of the things that has always amazed me is how many people will work harder at doing something criminal, something that will make some fast cash but have a high risk of ruining their lives, than they will at doing something that's perfectly legitimate and can keep them happy for the rest of their days.

as I weaved and wended my dappled way toward Jackson Lane, I felt certain nobody here would ever commit an impolite crime, and whatever crimes they did commit, they would never be so vulgar as to get caught.

Makes me sick to think that I chose to become part of a system that can so easily and arbitrarily decide to destroy a man for doing exactly what was right.

the path to hell starts when we rob other people of their humanity. Once they stop being human, we can do what the hell we like to them. As long as we allow others to retain their humanity, we retain our own.

Steve Irwin did wonderful conservation work but I was uncomfortable about some of his stunts. Even if animals aren't aware that you are not treating them with respect, the viewers are.

I can't really speak for the right, but it seems to me that people on the right are less bothered about a virtuous self-image.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, was above corruption so long as human beings were involved.

The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times.

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times. (John Fiske)

You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.

I think we can allow the therapeutic uses of nuclear transplant technology, which we call cloning, without running the danger of actually having live human beings born.

Members of society must obey the law because they personally believe that its commands are justified.

Tattnall from 1937 to 1941 shows no white bodies were donated for cadaver use during those five years while fifty-three black corpses were taken. Racial discrimination seemed to have no end, even after death.

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

On my view there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.

Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically.

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place

Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child's sake. That much should be apparent to everybody, even those who reject the stronger view for which I argue in this book-that not only does one not benefit people by bringing them into existence, but one always harms them.

There's such a thing as chronic pain, but there's no such thing as chronic pleasure. ... For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good. But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn't be bad, because there'd be nobody to be deprived of those good things.

It is good that existers enjoy their pleasures. It is also good that pains are avoided through non-existence. However, that is only part of the picture. Because there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, but there is something bad about coming into existence, it seems that all things considered non-existence is preferable.

To kill an animal in order to satisfy your nutritional desires, not your nutritional needs, that seems to me to be completely unacceptable.