Quotes About Ethics

Dissection," writes historian Ruth Richardson in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, "requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being.

There are lies and lies. Now and then the Great Recorder must put one on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul.

Evil thenceforth became my good.

When one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed.

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

Who could be interested in the fate of a murderer, but the hangman who would gain his fee?

I saw- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together... Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.

Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.

For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator toward his creature were, and that i ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness.

it is decided as you may have expected; all judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer, than that one guilty should escape.

I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?

Yo era bueno y cariñoso; el sufrimiento me ha envilecido. Concededme la felicidad, y volveré a ser virtuoso.

it is certainly more creditable to cultivate the earth for the sustenance of man, than to be the confidant, and sometimes the accomplice, of his vices; which is the profession of a lawyer.

He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business.

It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm.

Si el estudio al que nos dedicamos tiende a debilitar nuestros afectos y a destruir nuestro gusto por los placeres sencillos en los que no puede haber mezcla ninguna, entonces ese estudio es indefectiblemente malo y en modo alguno conveniente para la mente humana.

Those moral laws on which all human excellence is founded—a love of truth in ourselves, and a sincere sympathy with our fellow-creatures.

A child thinks life is fair. A man stands by the consequences of his deeds.

What a personage says or does reveals a certain moral purpose; and a good element of character, if the purpose so revealed is good. Such goodness is possible in every type of personage, even in a woman. ARISTOTLE: The Art of Poetry. (tr. Ingram Bywater.)

Monsters, says Mary, are of our own making.

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.