Quotes About Ethics

Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving.

Opportunity lies where responsibility has been advocated

So, I must take the complexity of the world, reduce it to a single point so that I can act, and take everyone else and their future selves into consideration while I am doing so.

If you haven't done anything wrong, do not apologize.

How hard someone [a child] is hit, and why they are hit, cannot merely be ignored when speaking of hitting. Timing, part of context, is also of crucial importance.

Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, "What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?

What should you do, when you don't know what to do? Tell the truth.

Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.

the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.

These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of pain—that is wrong.

Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.

Cuando la estructura de una institución se ha vuelto corrupta -sobre todo de acuerdo a sus propios principios- criticarla es un acto de amistad.

Možda spašavate nekoga zato što ste snažna, velikodušna, sre?ena osoba koja želi u?initi pravu stvar. Ali mogu?e je - i, možda, ?ak vjerojatnije - da samo želite usmjeriti pažnju na svoje neisrpive zalihe suosje?anja i dobre volje. (...) Ili možda zato što je lakše izgledati krjeposnim kada stojite pored nekoga posve neodgovorna. Prvo pretpostavite da ?inite najlakšu stvar, a ne onu najtežu.

Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

Dedica tus esfuerzos a hacer cosas con significado, no aquello que más te convenga.

If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking.

Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.

But a villain who despairs of his villainy has not become a hero. A hero is something positive, not just the absence of evil.

Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle (and we should keep this fact firmly before our eyes) that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, under the sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong.

There is a responsibility that everyone can take up: we need to decide if we are going to collectively and individually tilt the world towards heaven or tilt it towards hell.

Virtue signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest vice.)

That is the moral of both narratives: follow the rules until you are capable of being a shining exemplar of what they represent, but break them when those very rules now constitute the most dire impediment to the embodiment of their central virtues.

To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves.