Quotes About Ethics

if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.

Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.

Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. No code of conduct ever persuaded a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife. The law court may force him to provide bread for the family, but it cannot make him provide the bread of love.

Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.

In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Svaki ?ovjek mora odlu?iti ho?e li hodati u svjetlu kreativnog altruizma ili u tami destruktivnog egoizma.

it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Never, never be afraid to do what is right. Society's punishments are small compare to the wounds we inflict on our souls when we look away

Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the wellbeing of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was legal and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was illegal. It was illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.

It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

But they are becoming an irrelevant and querulous sect, opposed to everything but wind and solar farms with no thought of what we do when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. They are against nuclear power, against exploring for natural gas, against coal and oil, against foie gras and even against the use of genetic science in

We can only do what we can live with.

Hitler had been a pioneer of hunting bans. Gerta often wondered how the Führer could consider killing foxes unsporting but not have an issue with killing fellow human Jews.

She wondered what he'd make of the murder. "Well, well," he would say, "veddy bad. But would it be better if we did not know about it? No. Certainly not. And if we know, must we not do something about it? Certainly. If only to pray.

It takes chracter to refuse a man you love more dearly than life merely because marrying him would be the wrong thing to do.

Unfortunately, Sir Gerald, people rarely get what they deserve in this life. Perhaps that is why we have had to invent a heaven. - Miss Blythe, A Precious Jewel

If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders.