Quotes About Ethics

It [Romanticism] is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

Señor d.'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?" "Just exactly what it deserves." "Oh, how cruel!" "Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?" Francisco asked gravely. "I do.

There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.

The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek.

Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

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 a natural fact is neither just nor unjust, by what mental leap does it become a moral problem and an issue of justice? Why should those "favored by nature" be made to atone for what is not an injustice and is not of their making?

All work is an act of philosophy.

Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me - the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought...

If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

And if this should lighten the toil of men, said Similarity 5-0306, then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save in toiling for other men.

one can't be good halfway or honest approximately.

Just prove that a thing makes men happy—and you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt.

Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.

Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." (Atlas Shrugged)

Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

Do not, however, make the error of reversing cause and effect: the good of the country was made possible precisely by the fact that it was not forced on anyone as a moral goal or duty; it was merely an effect; the cause was a man's right to pursue his own good. It is this right—not its consequences—that represents the moral justification of capitalism.

You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues.

All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean.

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

For the We must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and an unspeakable lie.