Quotes About Ethics

The idea that a corporation should bear no responsibility to anything other than the financial bottom line of its stockholders destroys the

How we are talking to each other is as corrupt and corrupting as what anyone is saying

En la sociedad siempre triunfa la hipocresía!

I know that many men are living in the tangles of sin, but too weak of will to break the net in which they have become voluntarily imprisoned.

The five dollars I gave her would never reach her. I knew that: because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it. Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention, sister to the Sin of Omission, which was the price for what you hadn't done but thought. Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed it would start to happen; then I'd beg it to stop, and it would.

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we feed on in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.

The seeds of who I am now had been planted. Fools aren't born, I wrote in my notebook one day during ethics class. They are watered and grown like weeds by institutions such as Christianity.

I spent hours flipping through the stations, watching Pat Robertson preach about society's evils and then ask people to call him with their credit card number.

When you're taught to love everyone, to love your enemies, what value does that put on love?

morals are worn as a badge to make you look good and [...] it's so much easier to talk about your beliefs than to live up to them

I was very apprehensive, mostly because I didn't want to get caught. By now, I had begun to feel removed from the everyday world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.

The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity.

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me.

There are many ways to live a good life

Avoid transgression. How's that for advice.

morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.

You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn't even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.

She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.

doctrine is not the same as belief, it is simply a way talking about it; beliefs are lived

A metaphysics is a great help in rationalizing scruple-driven behavior.

I have always wondered if the Commandments should be read as occurring in order of importance. If that is correct, honoring your mother is more important than not committing murder. That seems remarkable, though I am open to the idea.

When defects of character are your character, you become a what.

It offends my conscience to bear witness against him.