Quotes About Ethics

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime.

People cannot live by lending money to one another.

Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is What do you like Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.

Doubt is thus the space between reality and the application of an idea. It ought to be given over to the weighing of experience, intuition, creativity, ethics, common sense, reason and, of course, knowledge, in balanced consideration of what is to be done. The longer this stage lasts the more we take advantage of our intelligence.

Making someone die, he was suddenly sure, was different from killing them. He could never kill anyone. But he could make someone die.

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

Preachers say, Do as I say, not as I do.

Preachers say: do as I say, not what I do

Religion is a mixed blessing.

The land didn't need laws. But people did.

Old proverb says, That bird is not honest That filleth his own nest.

R-4 got stuck on the First Law. "Can anyone really protect a human being from all harm whatever?" it thought. "No. It is inevitable that all humans must be injured, contract illnesses and ultimately die. The future can only be averted for humans who are already dead. Ergo ..." It took a dozen cops to subdue R-4, after his blood orgy in a department store (83 dead, none injured).

Never knowingly undersold.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

Anything that just costs money is cheap.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

If our moral principles always existed in a vivid and healthy state, there might be little need for the slow retrogressive process of induction in ethics; but as these instincts are peculiarly liable to be enfeebled, curtailed, and perverted by individual neglect, as well as social constraint, the corrective and cathartic process by induction on a more extended basis becomes necessary for the worst men, and not without utility for the best.

A fair face without a fair soul is like a glass eye that shines and sees nothing.

The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain.

Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.

As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.