Quotes About Ethics

If Joan Rivers had gone to the electric chair instead of Ethel Rosenberg, this is the book she would have written.

Without the sense that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and that there are appropriate consequences to violating society's most basic values, the concepts of morality and right and wrong become meaningless. And then you have no society.

Whatever you are, be a good one. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it.

Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as a free-standing substitute for it.

our" reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann's work were not especially honest.

if you take away one single thing from Climategate, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process.

There are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but sadly no Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.

Be good and you will be lonesome.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing clean and green.

I'm more interested in being good than being famous.

Be strong enough to carry the burden of sin that goes with doing the right thing.

If the impulse to act correctly did not come from yourself, Confucius said to a follower, what good could it do for you? In his mind, the moral was beautiful, and it should not succumb to rules. Rules diminish its beauty and subtlety, and adherence to them is an admission of one's own moral failure.