Quotes About Ethics

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good—for slaves, at least.

But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make?

For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kid, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own

Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and æsthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant–it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery–and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided.

There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She

?ujte i po?ujte, pravda i krivda su se oduvijek ?inile sasvim jednostavno shvatljive, no granica izme?u pravde i krivde ?esto je zamagljena i vidljiva samo onima koji s njima manipuliraju.

Wydaje ci siÄ™, ?e istnieje coÅ› takiego jak natura ludzka, która oburzona tym, co robimy, zwróci siÄ™ przeciwko nam. Ale pamiÄ™taj, ?e to my ksztaÅ'tujemy ludzkÄ… naturÄ™. CzÅ'owiek jest nieskoÅ"czenie podatny na formowanie.

to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

Yanl?? adam? asmak, hiç adam asmamaktan iyidir.

without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.

he could not—take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins.

thou contentedly let the years slip by and make no effort to repay, then thou hast but the contemptible soul of a slave. No man is otherwise who cannot respect himself and no man can respect himself who does not repay honest debts.

L'idéal de l'amour est certainement la fidélité éternelle. Les lois morales et religieuses ont voulu consacrer cet idéal; les faits matériels le troublent, les loi civiles sont faites de maniére à le rendre souvent impossible ou illusoire.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn't so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Plus he'd been raised on a farm, or near a farm anyways, and anybody raised on a farm knew you had to do what you had to do in terms of sick animals or extra animals—the pup being not sick, just extra.

Probably someday some guy representing me will be in there, and some punk who I'm precursor of will be hooting at me, asking why my shoes were made out of dead cows and so forth? Because in that future time, wearing dead sking on your feet, no, they won't do that. That will seem to them like barbarity

His heart dropped at the thought of the killing. hans vollman Did the thing merit it. Merit the killing. On the surface it was a technicality (mere Union) but seen deeper, it was something more.

In these times, strange times that they are," he says, "seeing someone do something that's not patently selfish and fucked-up is like a breath of fresh air, good clean fresh air, not that any one of us would know good clean fresh air if a vial of it swooped down and bit us on the ass!

I'd say there's a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer's work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.

Qué es nuestra historia —desde el asesinato de Caín hasta los hornos de gas y la incineración nuclear—, sino la crónica de lo inhumano?