Quotes About Ethics

Justice does not exist in the abstract," Epicurus flatly asserts; it is just "a compact to not harm or be harmed";

Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue.

Tibetan poet Shabkar said: "One with compassion is kind even when angry; one without compassion will kill even as he smiles.

What do you do when the devil turns up in your living room and offers you everything you want?

Lies are a tremendous karmic setback. Keep it up and you'll come back in the next life as something without a spine. You're not fine. And you don't have to be fine.

She didn't want him to have good qualities. Horrible people should be horrible all the time.

Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.

She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good.

We are fornicating in the sight of six billion people.

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence.

To count upon his virtue and use it as an instrument of torture, to practice blackmail with the victim's generosity as sole means of extortion, to accept the gift of a man's good will and turn it into a tool for the giver's destruction.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please.

But it's a crime! It's a crime against the nation. Don't you know that?" "No." "It's against the law!" "Yes.

It's as if they'd heard that there are values one is supposed to honor and this is what one does to honor them -- so they went through the motions, like ghosts pulled by some sort of distant echoes from a better age.

When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction.

We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

A "selfless," "disinterested" love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

What I described last," said Francisco, "is any man who proclaims his right to a single penny of another man's effort.

We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.