Quotes About Ethics

Princes may make laws and repeal them, but they can neither make nor destroy virtue, and how indeed should they be able to do what is impossible to the Deity himself? Virtue being as immutable in its nature as the divine will which is the ground of it.

Morality does not derive its nature from books, but from the fitness of things.

It was never in my dreams to make my personal life anybody else's business.

Speech. Do not speak ill of others. A knight does not spread news that he does not know to be certain, or condemn things that he does not understand.

Respect also means never asking someone to do something you wouldn't do or haven't done yourself. As an associate, I always felt a bit better knowing that if I was in the office at midnight, my EM was too.

Here's my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind—and her relationship to other sentient beings—above whatever else she might achieve in life.

This is perhaps the greatest lesson that interdependence has to offer us about right livelihood (and right living in general) in the twenty-first century: no person, and no profession, comes out completely clean, ever. On the other hand, no one is inherently defiled.

Ik heb me enige onsterfelijke verdiensten aan de mensheid verworven: ik heb nooit een slecht boek geschreven en ik heb het niet op m'n geweten, dat er een ongelukkige méér op deze aarde rondloopt.

I'd rather lay an egg in a box than go and steal an ox.

Would the war dehumanize me so that I, too, could "field trip" enemy dead with such nonchalance?

We all know that the big explosion is going to happen. Your concern, the two of you, is to make sure that you die intellectually correct. But my problem is more primitive. I only want to make sure that when it comes and my boys are dying that I am there to ease their last pain with morphine.

A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook.

I want to develop discernments that say an unapologetic "no" to ways that violate the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The temptations that use the raw material of good for evil can continue unrecognized for a long time without awareness.

It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one's neighbor in order to borrow his tools.

30.7-9] And then he prayed, "God, I'm asking for two things before I die; don't refuse me—Banish lies from my lips and liars from my presence. Give me enough food to live on, neither too much nor too little. If I'm too full, I might get independent, saying, 'God? Who needs him?' If I'm poor, I might steal and dishonor the name of my God.

All moral relationships are indissoluble according to their concept, as one can easily convince one's self by postulating their truth. A true state, a true marriage, a true friendship, and indissoluble. But no state, no marriage, no friendship corresponds completely to its concept... (Karl Marx)

I hate doctors! They'll do anything... to keep you coming to them. They'll sell their souls. What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you never know it till one day you find yourself in hell.

We use this comparison, even if improperly, because dogs, hyenas, or other fierce beasts never do the evil things that men do.)

In a way one is reminded of the pretty little birdhouses for the starlings set out by the tenderhearted butchers in the Auschwitz barracks.)

In proposing that one truth may derail another, it invites an enduring question—do we believe vaccination to be more monstrous than disease?

We shouldn't ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity

Clinton chose his language very carefully. About Rwanda, he said that, at the time, he "did not fully appreciate" the extent of the genocide. Not that he did not know. Because he did know. The Washington Post reported piles of bodies six feet high, and the evening news showed rivers choked with corpses. Regret, not action, had been his policy decision. Regret, he hoped, would not cost him anything.