Quotes About Ethics

Have the wild things no moral or legal rights? What right has man to inflict such long and fearful agony on a fellow creature, simply because that creature does not speak his language?

El conocimiento nos hace responsables

Baseball reveals character; golf exposes it.

The only way to prove that you're a good sport is to lose.

Only an atheist can be a good Christian.

If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

It is infinitely more appealing to be a criminal than a bourgeois.

When I saw several thugs attack a lone man, or a larger man a small one, or even when a mastiff attacked a toy Pomeranian, not virtue but plain disgust upset my insides. This early variety of defeatism later became an obsolete trait—damaging me in today's world.

Strangely enough, no one can simply go ahead and do another person harm. You first have to convince yourself that the other has deserved it.

Ci sono poveri per i quali il ricco non è un'aspirazione. Ci sono poveri, in sostanze e in spirito, renitenti alla leva. Ero ostile a quel modo di istigare uno a sopravanzare all'altro, per temperamento non per convinzione. Il male che mi insegnavi a riconoscere, io lo vedevo causato dalle persone. Mi sorvegliavo per non procurarlo, perché anche un rossore risparmiato a un altro fa parte delle proprie responsabilità.

You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.

It's disgusting to kill, Laila. You never get rid of death's grease. It doesn't wash away.

If, to win, we have to set up the gallows in the public square, I would prefer to lose.

the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party . . ., even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed."55

Erwin Chemerinsky

The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were. ...Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

For a minister's daughter," he said, "you hit hard ... and quite often, below the belt too.

But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of of self-absorption, while guilt is an emphatic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another.

He tells them that there is a line that separates killing bugs from killing frogs, and that no matter how hard it is, that line must never be crossed

Except that when it came to choosing between smiles and thanks on the one hand, and the good of society on the other, this driver knew what it had to be.