Quotes About Ethics

When I am dead I would rather people thought me better than I was instead of worse; but if they think me worse, I cannot help it and, if it matters at all, it will matter more to them than to me.

Truth consists not in never lying but in knowing when to lie and when not to do so.

He that imposes an oath makes it,Not he that for convenience takes it;Then how can any man be saidTo break an oath he never made?

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.

It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the evil that they never did as well.

Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.

Besides so long as a man has not been actually killed he is our fellow-creature, though perhaps a very unpleasant one.

There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

The reality is that the way in which a leader conducts his personal life does, in fact, have a profound impact on his ability to exercise effective public leadership.

I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs him his job.

I'd sell my soul to the devil if he'd buy such a weakly, puny, piffling little soul, just really to live and be something besides a "thoroughly nice girl" for one short year.

A wasted human being--that's a sort of practical blasphemy, according to my religion.

With the exception of lawyers, there is no profession which considers itself above the law so widely as the medical profession.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt

An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.

The woman's a whore, and there's an end on 't.

Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.