Quotes About Ethics

The trouble with Austin was that he believed so deeply in the chivalrous virtues that he found it impossible to refer to them.

I wonder if there exists any other man, even at this Court, who has to be restrained day and night to preserve a girl's honour?

He's s o damned moral that he ought to be standing rear up under a Bo Tree.

None of that, however, concerned Buccleuch who was little troubled, if ever, with matters of right and wrong.

You promise food and horses and nonresistance and when they invade, you do or don't lick their boots according to the thickness of your walls and the kind of conscience you have.

Humility is a virtue Scotsmen require to be taught.

A pity, she thought, that taking a stand on moral issues had to prove so lonely these days

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do—merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.

You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him, said Miss Hillyard. It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of. But that, said Peter, was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.

I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.

Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.

After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you'll feel all the better.

Nobody minds coarseness, but one must draw the line at cruelty -Lord Peter Wimsey

I could not attempt to 'kindle the younger generation with the Gospel,' the most I could do would be to suggest to them that the Christian Faith is a logical explanation of the Universe well worth their attention, and neither an irrational myth nor a system of ethics which will stand by itself when the dogmatic foundation has been removed from beneath it.

As the Head of a woman's college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word 'compromise' had been omitted from her vocabulary; and all statesmanship is compromise.

You can't carry through any principle without doing violence to somebody. Either directly or indirectly. Every time you disturb the balance of nature you let in violence. And if you leave nature alone you get violence in any case.

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

Dorothy L. Sayers

We've no quarrel with the Church, you know, if she'll stick to her business and leave us to ours." "My dear man, if you can cure sin with an injection, I shall be only too pleased.

of my own honesty.

principles have become more dangerous than passions. It's getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does—if it really is a principle—is to kill somebody." "'The real tragedy is not the conflict of good with evil but of good with good'; that means a problem with no solution.