Quotes About Ethics

Perhaps, beguiled by custom and order, one's sense of evil goes numb.

While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The jury had persuaded themselves that he was decent, because they had wanted to think that in his shoes they would have been decent too. They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.

But it's the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world—ain't it, though!

One gets paid back in the way one deserves.

We are not here to help them, ma'am. We are here to punish them. There are too many good women who are poor or ill or hungry, for us to bother with the bad ones.

In the Peace Corps, the volunteer must be a fully developed, mature person. He must not join to run abroad or escape problems.

Secrets aren't the same as lying,' Vaughn commented, because they both had the muddiest of ethics, which was an odd thing to have in common.

What the hell was an acquisitions consultant? An arms dealer? A white slave trader?

Even in decline, a virtuous man increases the beauty of his behavior. A burning stick, though turned to the ground, has its flame drawn upwards.

The end of education is character

Good company is important, it helps to cultivate good qualities.

If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.

Bertolt Brecht's observation in The Threepenny Opera that eating takes precedence over morality. Emerging

one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's distance from the scene of conflict.

Mendoza said to Tanner, "I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich." Tanner replied, "I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands." The

The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, pointed out the variations in ethical definitions by virtue of where you stand. Mendoza said to Tanner, "I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich." Tanner replied, "I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands." The

The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land.

in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.

Whenever the word power is mentioned, somebody sooner or later will refer to the classical statement of Lord Acton and cite it as follows: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In fact the correct quotation is: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." We can't even read Acton's statement accurately, our minds are so confused by our conditioning.

The Ninth Rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

Don't Drink And Drive, But When You Do, Call Saul.

If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth and still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because after all, nuns haven't got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the Pope, because women aren't good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God?

Aquinas wondered what would happen if God wanted to achieve universal resurrection. In other words, bringing everybody who had ever lived back to life at the same time. What would happen to cannibals, and the people they ate? You couldn't bring them all back at the same time, because the cannibals are made of the people they have eaten. You could have one but not the other. Ha.' I looked at Rowan. 'That's a good example of a paradox.