Quotes About Ethics

Estamos en huelga contra el martirio y contra el código moral que lo exige, contra quienes creen que uno debe existir sólo para beneficiar a otros y contra esa moral de caníbales, tanto si se practica de un modo material como espiritual.

Usted no quiere que piense. Cuando fuerza a un hombre a actuar contra su placer y a su juicio, es su pensamiento el que desea suprimir. Anhela convertirlo en un robot. Pues bien, obraré de acuerdo con esto.

Obrando con razón y justicia, sólo se podía llegar a un resultado.

As under any occupation, reality was a muddle, the ethics of not collaborating clanging against the instinct to adapt and survive. During wartime, ideals were a luxury.

Rather than being discovered or revealed, morality is a historically developing human creation in the service of social needs.

Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Could one really concentrate on one's job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?

She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that?

Est-ce que nous considérons que tout est acceptable, que nous n'avons aucune responsabilité envers les autres, que seule compte la satisfaction de nos besoin?

These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards.

Il peggior crimine di un regime totalitario è costringere i cittadini, incluse le vittime, a diventare suoi complici.

wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home.

Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs? Well, that is the crux of the great novels xxx - the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.

Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals," proclaimed Ayatollah Khomeini, responding to protests by international human rights organizations of the wave of executions that followed the revolution.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.' So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly ironic, which on rare occasions, and this was one of them, bordered on the burlesque.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.

Well, that is the crux of the great novels," Manna added, "like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, or James's for that matter—the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.

No one is pro-abortion.

We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.

there was the unsettling fact that, despite whatever my mother might claim, the bullies, cheats, and self-promoters seemed to be doing quite well, while those she considered good and decent people seemed to get screwed an awful lot.

You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate.

What I could not support was a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

And then there was the unsettling fact that, despite whatever my mother might claim, the bullies, cheats, and self-promoters seemed to be doing quite well, while those she considered good and decent people seemed to get screwed an awful lot.

A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It's what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.