Quotes About Ethics

What's right isn't always popular, and whats popular isn't always right.

Causing harm is never just a one-way street.

A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect.

Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong—or fairness versus unfairness—that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation.

Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.

Mahabharata claims that 'if a man has one thousand tongues, lives for a hundred years and does nothing except describing the faults of woman, he will die without finishing the job').

When a marauder destroys your house and takes away your cash and jewellery , his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened door to him, whether out of fear, cupidity or because he simply he didn't know any better.

The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow

History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.

The highest officers in the government had the strongest motives to corruption, and therefore could by no possibility attempt to check the same corruption in those below them…

We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, then it must be "according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else".

lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious.

I told her the time to start worrying about a lawyer's fee was after he brought it up: which was a lie. Most people didnt pay them anyhow, I said: which at least was partly true, to a degree.

Once scientists were universally revered as exemplars of independent truth seeking, of knowledge for its own sake, but in recent years they have been accused of fraud, misrepresenting their findings, and other forms of cheating reflective of a highly competitive, market-oriented culture.

Over the centuries politicians and political theorists—starting with Plato's Republic—have emphasized disinterestedness, not personal advantage, as the fundamental virtue required of those entrusted with state power.

The techniques developed for the marketplace have been adapted by political consultants and their media experts. The result has been the pollution of the ecology of politics by the inauthentic politics of misrepresentative government, claiming to be what it is not, compassionate and conservative, god-fearing and moral.

system and encouraging our clients' friends to intimidate witnesses. More people read the Chronicle than the State Bar Journal, and the mayor

You didn't do anything illegal, and you shouldn't be penalized just because the technology outpaced the theology.

It is not possible to sin enough to be happy. It isn't possible to buy enough to be happy, or to entertain or indulge or pamper ourselves enough to be happy. It is not possible to hide enough or run far enough away from trials and troubles to be happy. Happiness and joy come only when we are living up to who we are... I have never met anyone who was happier because he was immoral, or because he was addicted to something, or because he was dishonest and compromised his integrity.

It is possible to be clean in a dirty world.

Power is power as the sun is the sun, the wind is the wind. The villager blesses the rain as it falls on his crops; the pillager uses it to cover his approach. It is the wielder who determines the good or evil.

It seems ridiculous, but when people are self-righteous, they really tend to prefer punishment to prevention.

The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.

I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.