Quotes About Ethics

What makes a monster and what makes a man?

I have never, not once, violated my public trust.

A YOUNG STUDENT asked permission to go to a wedding. Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian (1872–1970) asked him if there might be women there dressed immodestly. The student replied that he had prepared a strategy: he wouldn't look. Rabbi Lopian turned to the student and said, "I'm already over eighty years old, and blind in one eye, yet despite this, I look!

THERE ARE FOUR TYPES of temperaments. One who is easily angered and easily appeased—his virtue cancels his flaw. One whom it is difficult to anger and difficult to appease—his flaw cancels his virtue. One whom it is difficult to anger and is easily appeased, is pious. One who is easily angered and is difficult to appease, is wicked. —PIRKEI AVOT 5:11

Rabbi Elyakim Krumbein puts it, "To fulfill the Torah means to grow as a person, and to grow truly as a person is tantamount to the fulfillment of Torah.

It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it.

When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven't any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for? I couldn't face that question. (Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful)

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?

in so many areas of life, Nature had made it agreeable for man to do what was virtuous.

I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.

When we choose things that are evil and stupid, then we pay the cost of lost opportunities to do something good—something wise and unselfish.

He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself doesn't become a monster.

Crime doesn't pay," I said to Sirius, "unless you're a lawyer.

I imagined were his own litmus test, saying, "If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul to lose.

The world was amoral. To be idealistic was to ask to be blindsided,

she did everything as if God were watching her: never threw bread on the fire (which was feeding the devil)

Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.

Always ask yourself, "Would I be proud of this if it appeared all over the Internet tomorrow?

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the facade of his appearance.

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

We know that there are no self-evident truths.

The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man

It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

The concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history.