Quotes About Ethics

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Values spoken without actions taken are merely slogans.

What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: I cant so you musnt, and I can but you musnt.

I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever Ive done Ive helped to nail a lie, and Im coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them. I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders, Jogajong said. It is what must be paid to buy what we want. What weve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.

UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didnt manage.

Little hooligans showing off is okay when they do it away from us, but we don't need that kind of behaviour. You have to have standards. Would have done the same when I was their age, but I'm not. Now is now. There's no room for nostalgia.

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.

Do what is right, and the reward will be immediate and multitudinous. Think what is right, and your authority will grow.

Christian religion defines morality by a belief system based on a master-slave relationship, and rooted in resentment of the raw beauty and power of the life force.

of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.

As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.

The way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation.

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.

And then Ginny jumping in with, "So Donald Trump and Sarah Palin are both drowning in the pool right in front of you, and you know there's only going to be a minute or two before one or both of them goes under. Here's the question: What kind of sandwich do you make?

are not punished for their sins, but by

There are no objective values.

The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so

So far as ethics is concerned, my thesis that there are no objective values is specifically the denial that any such categorically imperative element is objectively valid.