Quotes About Ethics

Wilberforce understood the idea that the law itself is a "teacher" and will lead people toward what it prescribes and away from what it prohibits. But he knew that a debased culture cannot be stemmed through legislation alone. Indeed, if one wishes to make certain laws, one must change the culture first, else those laws will never be passed. In

It was an odious process whereby one wined and dined one's constituents and gave speeches. It was all many degrees more shameless than anything we complain of today, not least because one was quite literally expected to pay each elector two guineas as a bribe.

King George III himself, it must be pointed out, stood out as a rare and notable exception to the advanced moral decay of those around him. He was deeply sensitive to his symbolic position as the head of the country and sincerely wished to set an example for the subjects he ruled.

They believed that in watching these burnings and dissections, they had an actual window into hell itself.

Thus," he said, "the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound.

You can talk about right and wrong and good and bad all day long, but ultimately people need to see it. Seeing and studying the actual lives of people is simply the best way to communicate ideas about how to behave and how not to behave. We need heroes and role models.

the Golden Triangle of Freedom is, when reduced to its most basic form, that freedom requires virtue; virtue requires faith; and faith requires freedom.

As nations become corrupt and vicious," he says, "they have more need of masters." The root of the word "vicious" is "vice"—the word simply means "full of vice." So Franklin, without feeling the need to explain himself much, is bluntly saying that "freedom requires virtue." And that less virtue inevitably begets less freedom. In

The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue.

One knows what is right, but holds it at arm's length for a time, neither throwing it out, nor embracing it.

Adams understood that the secret to self-government is that the people must themselves be self-governing, which is to say they must be motivated by something beyond the law.

If you take God and faith and morality out of the equation, everything inevitably falls apart.

while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust." He

So Franklin, without feeling the need to explain himself much, is bluntly saying that "freedom requires virtue." And that less virtue inevitably begets less freedom.

He understood that the law could not force people to do what was right. In fact, the laws of America didn't try to do this. They provided freedom, and what the citizens did with that freedom was something else altogether. "Thus," Tocqueville writes, "while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust." He

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles. According

Tocqueville put it as bluntly as Franklin or Adams had, writing: "Liberty cannot be established without morality.

Never to speak about a brother in his absence. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Adams understood that the secret to self-government is that the people must themselves be self-governing, which is to say they must be motivated by something beyond the law. Each individual must govern himself, and for this morality was plainly necessary.

What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia.

Montesquieu, who wrote that "bad examples can be worse than crimes." He continued: "More states have perished because of a violation of their mores than because of a violation of their Laws." What

what it was that made one virtuous, whether religion or simple cultural habit, or a

Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

You can speak of the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics.