Quotes About Ethics

To boast loudly in public of one's own country seemed to him indecent – like enlarging on the physical perfections of one's own wife in a smoking room.

I'm sure one should do one's own job, however trivial, and not persuade one's self into doing somebody else's, however noble.

They knew, with the painful conviction of experience, what it meant to say, "I see and approve the better, but follow the worse.

Never throw mud. You may miss your mark, but you will have dirty hands.

When I was young and bold and strong, Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass an involuntary sterilization law, empowering state institutions to sterilize, without consent, criminals and "imbeciles" whose condition was "pronounced unimprovable" by a panel of physicians.

Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered "prime stock" to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.

A year later Matthew Rees, writing for the New Republic, similarly defended Norplant incentives on the ground that the current threat to children in our inner cities makes it an option that the morally serious can no longer simply dismiss. (Our inner cities and the underclass, of course, are another way of referring to the Black urban poor.)

Men convicted of attempted rape or whom hospital authorities considered unruly were castrated to make them "easier to handle." Because they were not considered intelligent enough, none of the patients was asked for consent.

In one case, a teenage girl who was twelve weeks pregnant came to the Boston hospital for an abortion. She was told that it was too late for her to have a regular abortion and that a hysterectomy was necessary. When the medical student who observed the operation asked a resident why such drastic action was taken, the resident replied that the doctor "wanted a hysterectomy done for the experience.

Dr. C, chief of surgery at a northeastern hospital, for example, gave Corea his opinion that "a girl with lots of kids, on welfare, and not intelligent enough to use birth control, is better off being sterilized." " 'Not intelligent enough to use birth control,;' " Corea added, "is often a code phrase for 'black' or 'poor.

But that spring Washington had ordered an end to the hormonal injections when they were linked to cancer in laboratory animals. Instead, the Relfs later learned, their daughters were sterilized.

The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody. --Gaudy Night

The possibility of evil exists from the moment that a creature is made that can love and do good because it chooses and not because it is unable to do anything else. The actuality of evil exists from the moment that that choice is exercised in the wrong direction.

Why it should feel worse to speak ill of the dead than the living I can't imagine.

I see myself as an instrument of justice, not a dispenser of it. -Detective Thanet.

Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

Because there are some things you have to do even if you are an enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and everything!

Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was never to buy his own drinks. He

the great thing about being the only species that makes a distiction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.