Quotes About Ethics

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just 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.

Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.

Can one who hates right govern?" Job 34:13

In Blanche's experience, the more a person believed love was a part of what they got from their employer, the more likely it was that the person was being asked to do things that only love could justify.

my wallet at the mall. I was sure I would never ever see it again," he said. I bobbed my head up and down. "I know it. That's because of Finders keepers, losers weepers," I said. "Finders keepers, losers weepers is the rule. Right, Grampa?

Barry Eisler

I read Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, where Niebuhr talked about how the baser self has to deceive the better self to get the better self's buy-in for behavior it would never otherwise agree to.

Barry Eisler

If he were a philosopher king or a benevolent dictator, the only jobs he thought he might enjoy more than his current occupation, he'd have a rule that you could only authorize a war if you were actually going to go off and personally fight it. That'd get the politicians singing "Kumbaya" right quick.

I thought of an expression my father had once told me: Be good to people on your way up. You may meet them again on your way down.

Treat me well, and I'll treat you better. Treat me badly, and I'll treat you worse.

When I'd killed Ozawa at the sent?, I'd briefly wondered whether I was now one of the bad guys. By the time I did McGraw, I'd figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise r?nin, I decided, than a naïve samurai.

no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane.

there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters

Barry Eisler

I considered. As Tatsu noted, if word got out, the efficacy of the camera network would be compromised. But there was more.

Barry Eisler

People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there's just what you can do, and what you can't. Well, I could. And I was going to.

But she was also uneasy. She remembered when she'd been in college and had come across the Nietzsche quote: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.

Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.

In other words, that humans were not set apart by having "a soul.

To act here is to face one's own complicity, to choose to take life in order that one's own kin might continue to live. When I lie down to sleep far from home, I place this small work of art close by on a folded scarf.

The horrors—ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution—once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference. We denounce those who order it, we condemn the people who carry out the policies, calling them inhumane. But the behavior is fully human. We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.

Practical wisdom, Aristotle told us, is the combination of moral will and moral skill.