Quotes About Ethics

The best is a matter of standards

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.

Money is the barometer of society's virtue.

the only thing that can make a man do something he doesn't like is guilt

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world!

And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard? John Galt

What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that anything I do is right because I chose to do it, is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality--so the notion that anything society does is right because society chose to do it, is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles an the banishment of morality from social issues.

The theory that holds good blood or bad blood as a moral-intellectual criterion , can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice.

Wasn't it evil to wish without moving- or to move without aim?

But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did.

We are not used to persons who do things simply for the love of god whom they don't believe in.

Those who start by saying: 'It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others'—end up by saying: 'It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.

Nothing can justify injustice.

There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

The victims are the ones who made injustice possible.

I think it's a worthy undertaking--to provide a decent apartment for a man who earns fifteen dollars a week. But not at the expense of other men. Not if it raises the taxes, raises all the other rents and makes the man who earns forty live in a rat hole.

A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards...in order to appeal to the irrationality, dishonesty or stupidity of others.

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned 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.

It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you.

Any human being who accepts the help of another, knows that good will is the giver's only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return.