Quotes About Ethics

Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: "I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense." An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.

There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue.

When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed.

the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards.

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?

Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

Any alleged right of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another isn't and can't be a right.

A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist.

To me-the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the man who rejects men for being too good.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, comdemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God-- others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man's nature.

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy--nor a social convention--nor a dispensable, subjective luxury...Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival--not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life.

There is no such thing as the right to enslave.A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right. It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force (like soviet Russia), or by vote (like Nazi Germany).

And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.