Quotes About Ethics

If people start to buy the idea that machines are great companions for the elderly or for children, as they increasingly seem to do, we are really playing with fire.

If you don't believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency. Decency is very good. Better decent than indecent. But I don't think it's enough.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.

An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.

I'd never do a film that would hurt anyone's sentiments, be it Indian or not.

Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.

Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.

Virtue is the effort, the conquest of a difficulty, leaving, as its results, a balance of happiness. There may be, there is much good in the world, which no virtue has been concerned in producing. But there is no virtue where there is no balance of happiness.

The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still.

An absolute and unlimited right over any object of property would be the right to commit nearly every crime. If I had such a right over the stick I am about to cut, I might employ it as a mace to knock down the passengers, or I might convert it into a sceptre as an emblem of royalty, or into an idol to offend the national religion.

To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?

I do really take it for an indisputable truth, and a truth that is one of the corner stones of political science--the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.

My answer to this was that the purest-bred cats made better mousers when they were fat than when they were starving; and in the same way honest craftsmen did much better work when they had plenty to live on.

An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis.

Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts

It is impossible a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

historians should be doing, according to some, is condemning them and focusing on the immorality of slavery and the Founders' moral blinders.

he sincerely loathed slavery; he called it "an abominable crime" and a blot on civilization.

why did he not free his slaves?

This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.