Quotes About Ethics

Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same. There's only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?

If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days' examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month's time.

when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

He said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him. Am I dreaming this? Willa asked. No. No. He said that. It couldn't have been more than a week ago. Apparently he was right. Iano, nobody gets away with murder. You can't behave like a madman when you're running for public office. That kind of trash talk is supposed to end careers.

Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket.

I read in a book that they cut off the workers' hands if they hadn't collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled up like a mess of fish. Could this be true of civilized white Christians?

Ugly as homemade sin.

Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. Why resist that?

A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices.

I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.)

Engineered genes don't play by the rules that have organized life for three billion years (or, if you prefer, 4,004). And in this case, winning means loser takes all.

Religion has no place in the science classroom, where it may abridge students' opportunities to learn the methods, discoveries, and explanatory hypotheses of science. Rather, its place is in the hearts of the men and women who study and then practice scientific exploration. Ethics can't influence the outcome of an experiment, but they can serve as a useful adjunct to the questions that get asked in the first place, and to the applications thereafter.

For starters," she said, "you acknowledge that stimulate is a synonym for stealing from the future.

Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we're all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.

The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners. Our culture is not acquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're juts particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

Freedom of the presses to destroy a person's life for no good reason. (Lacuna, p. 419)

Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let's us be better than those guys so we can hate on them.

Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow.

He stamped me with a belief in justice, then drenched me in culpability, and I wouldn't wish such torment even on a mosquito.

It is possible to establish zero tolerance for murder as a solution to anything

If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn't technically hold it against me.