Quotes About Ethics

Dr Hasselbacher never talked in terms of morality; it was outside the province of a doctor.

Sooner or later,' Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, 'one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

We cannot always do what is right, Uriel. There is often a great gulf in the difference between the way things are and the way we believe they should be. Sometimes we must learn to accept the things we cannot change.' 'No, lord admiral, I believe we must endeavour to change the things we cannot accept. It is by striving against that which is perceived as wrong that makes a great warrior.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers – pity lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon…

Cassandra Nova impersonating Xavier: Imagine the responsibility of all that destructive potential. The power to crack the firmament and extinguish suns… Imagine that in the wrong hands.

Living a life of integrity is one of the greatest missions we can undertake.

Cheaters never prosper. (Because they suck.)

Cheaters never prosper

You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.

Did the fact that Martin Luther King diddled all those women change what he did for his people? Or Franklin Roosevelt? General Eisenhower? Not one whit. Men are men, and gods are for storybooks. And if you've read your Edith Hamilton or Jane Harrison—or the Old Testament, for that matter—you'll know that gods acted like men most of the time, or worse.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. —Aristotle

A man lives morally all his life, then in one weak moment commits an act that damns him in his own eyes and threatens his liberty, even his life.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming'?

Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word. It's how we respond that defines us.

Where good people stand against evil, sooner or later fate demands a reckoning.

But inevitably, after all the hardware questions had been answered, Breen would circle down to the question he'd really wanted to ask: What's it like to blow some unsuspecting raghead's shit away from a thousand yards? Carl always answered the same way: I tried not to think about that side of it, sir. It was a job, and I focused on the mechanics of it. Guys like Ray Breen never grasped the true nature of sniping. It was as much about concealment as it was about shooting.

the moral convictions of animal rights activists lasted about as long as it took them to get a fatal disease that could be cured by receiving a valve from a pig's heart. Suddenly that pig didn't seem so goddamned sacred after all.

he committed such a heinous act, would have owned up to it and taken his punishment like a man, as the archaic phrase goes. That may be a quaint and sexist notion these days, but some of what is best about the South is archaic. The tragedy is that it should be so.

When people got into the habit of lying, they came to depend on it as a means of sliding easily through life.

And the black politicians…my God. I've watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don't care whether something is legal or not." "White politicians abused the system for years, Caitlin. They just did it in a more subtle way." "I know that. But is that an excuse for blacks to repeat the abuses of the old system? The system Martin Luther King and Malcolm X died to dismantle?

And a man who does nothing during a crisis is as bad as a man who causes one.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Enlightened self-interest" was how Solo himself had described it.