Quotes About Ethics

If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.

Wanting to be in politics but not of it.

There are things more important," he told me, "than getting reelected.

Le problème au milieu d'une telle panique financière et dans une économie capitaliste moderne, c'est qu'il était impossible de faire la distinction entre les bonnes et les mauvaises entreprises, ou de ne châtier que les irresponsables et les crapuleux. Que cela nous plaise ou non, nous étions tous dans le même bateau.

It wasn't that people didn't know the difference between good and bad policy. It just didn't matter.

the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

Honest, decent men and women with attainable ambitions, and the determination to see those ambitions through.

honesty, and hard work, and empathy

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

I was riding with her on Marine One when she read that Donald Trump had divorced his first wife to marry a much younger woman. I learned she didn't have much patience with men who sought trophy wives when she said: That man will never set foot again in the White House as long as I have anything to do with it.

Integrity isn't something you have in some parts of your life and not in others. You either have it, or you don't.

Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.

Why shouldn't our "great chain of being" include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?

A thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it can have agency without being conscious.

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?

No one is morally justified in removing a man from his own soil, taking him to a faraway country and keeping him there by force. And no man is morally entitled to own another.

Honor is honor, whether one bargains with the honorable or the dishonorable.

You don't need the technical understanding to make the moral judgments.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.