Quotes About Ethics

When pundits and strategists claim "attack ads work," they mean it in the most cynical of terms. As Ipsos Reid researcher Andrew Grenville told the Vancouver Sun: "Attacks ads can often work in the short term. They can give you a short boost. But they reduce the number of people who want to vote. They reduce participation in the democratic process. They poison the system.

My mother would hate me saying any of this. My father, too. It didn't matter how unprivate you were: If what you had to say about your life impinged on the privacy of others, then you shouldn't say it. My mother loved stories, though, particularly stories about herself, and she is, I think, the hero of this book, which she would like.

It's possible to like bad people, but liking them doesn't make them good.

Why did you choose to save me?" "I could not let you die." He placed the plate and glass on the kitchen counter. "But you have let goodness knows how many people die. Why me?" "You made me..." He leaned against the counter and looked at her. "You made me…feel.

Given his own amorality, he could quite easily have come to terms with her criminal tendencies, but he could never, being the snob that he was, ever have overlooked her roots.

The notion that obedience dehumanizes those who render it is a popular cry of the philosophers of radical individualism, such as Thoreau, who are so important to America's myth of itself.

My God, she was right. 'You never even stole that money and yet they fire you. I could just take Alva Johnson by the neck and make her eat dog shit.

And I thought how when William came into money from his grandfather who had profited from the war, and Catherine was still alive at that time, she had said very little about it. But she did say to me, lying on the tangerine couch, not long after this had happened, "It's dirty money. He should give it all away." But William did not give it all away; he became very rich.

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.

We doctors are at fault in a lot of ways about drugs. For one thing, we prescribe too often—much of the time unnecessarily, and in part because it's well known among us that there are patients who feel cheated if they leave a doctor's office without a prescription. Another thing, writing a prescription is an easy way to end a patient interview, to get that patient out of the office and another one in.

now with his peace offer on the table, it would be even more imperative that the United States not choose sides, in order to preserve its moral leadership over the planet.

Like many high-minded people, Wilson, when faced with opposition that he considered evil but which refused to yield to his arguments, felt no compunction about simply crossing his arms and refusing to play the game.

For every quality in life—goodness, justice, courage, beauty, loyalty—there has to exist a single standard, a model of perfection of which, Socrates says, "all equal objects of sense Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are only imperfect copies.

The Aristotelian and Thomist mind works: it doesn't just wait around to recover something hidden or something lost. This includes the laws governing nature as understood by science and the laws that govern our own behavior in terms of morality and ethics.

It was Aristotle who first made private property the basis of the good life and the independent householder the basis of the free polis.18 The world of the Enlightenment took him firmly at his word.

with the new economic order, a new moral perspective was taking shape. The Enlightenment term for it was "politeness.

The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, "is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous," especially in our daily dealings with others.

for Aristotle ethics is not a science. We aren't looking for moral perfection. "In fact, such a life is not possible for man," Aristotle states. "If it were, he would be a God."23 Instead, we look for advantage and improvement. From that point of view, Aristotle assures us, learning to be virtuous is not that hard. It's all a matter of practice and learning the habits that go with it.

We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong

But that community still exists, Aristotle argues, in order to make the householder happy, rather than the other way around.

action is best, which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number

Man has freedom to do all he wills," Spencer wrote, "provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man.

Beginning with their founder, Zeno, the Stoics taught that the key to the happy life is adhering to a strict sense of virtue and a rigid duty toward others rather than indulging in pleasure, and a renunciation of, or at least an indifference to, all worldly goods.