Quotes About Ethics

Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for beeing good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world.

Si algunos hombres eligen no pensar o no trabajar, sólo pueden sobrevivir (temporalmente) saqueando los bienes producidos por otros; pero esos otros tuvieron que producirlos, o nadie habría sobrevivido.

Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man's reach.

I made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with—the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product.

there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and

Kant's expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

Debo recordarte también que el derecho a la vida es la fuente de la que manan todos los derechos, incluido el derecho de propiedad.

In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

I'll tell you…I'll tell you something…unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a superior sort of person.

I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me.

But of all the deadly theories by means of which you are now being destroyed, I would like to warn you about one of the deadliest and most crucial: the alleged dichotomy of science and ethics. It is the doctrine that man's science and ethics - or his knowledge and values, or his body and soul - are two separate, antagonistic aspects of his existence, and that man is caught between them, as a precarious, permanent traitor to their conflicting demands.

Si las acciones propias son honradas, uno no necesita la confianza de los demás, basta con la percepción racional de los otros. La persona que anhela un cheque moral en blanco de semejante género, lleva intenciones deshonestas, aunque no las exprese.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim

Durante siglos la batalla de la moralidad fue librada entre quienes proclamaban que la vida pertenece a Dios y quienes decían que pertenece al prójimo, entre quienes predicaban que la bondad es el autosacrificio en favor de unos fantasmas celestes y quienes predicaban que el bien es el auto-sacrificio en favor de los incompetentes de la tierra. Pero nadie vino a decir que vuestra vida os pertenece y que el bien reside en vivirla.

Si nos preguntamos cuáles son las razones que subyacen en la fea mezcla de cinismo y culpa en la que pasa su vida la mayoría de los hombres, diremos que son estas: cinismo, porque ni practican ni aceptan la moralidad altruista; culpa, porque no se atreven a rechazarla.

The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one's own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute's activities are in fact to one's own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors). For a view of the

Nada puede hacer que sea moral destruir a los mejores. Uno no puede ser castigado por ser bueno.

es imposible que la gente viva sin quebrantar alguna ley.

And that, in effect, is what he is actually doing; consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, when a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites," he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!

more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good.

If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims.

Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it—and that there is no other way for him to live. He

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?

Is it true that in the future society any woman will sleep with any man she wants," asked Renée Slottern. It had started as a question, but it petered out. She did not really want to know. She merely felt a vapid wonder about how it felt to have a man one really wanted and how one went about wanting.