Quotes About Ethics

Once a wily and wicked person, perceiving her helplessness, offered her a position as dish-washer in a fashionable and depraved cabaret; but our heroine was true to her rustic ideals and refused to work in such a gilded and glittering palace of frivolity—especially since she was offered only $3.00 per week with meals but no board.

There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law.

lo que se hace por humanidad es a veces cruelmente juzgado por la ley.

Al fin puede admitir voluntariamente que los deseos, esperanza y valores de la humanidad son asuntos del todo irrelevantes frente a a la ciega maquinaria cósmica. Considera la felicidad como un fantasma ético cuyo simulacro no alcanza a nadie de forma completa e incluso de refilón a muy pocos y cuya posición como objetivo de todos los esfuerzos humanos es una mezcla grotesca de farsa y tragedia.

Such was the code: Strive for victory, but never seem to be self-involved.

You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct.

He made his character his platform.

Ef maður vill stela í þjófafélagi, þá verður að stela samkvæmt lögum; og helst að hafa tekið þátt í því að setja lögin sjálfur.

Hef ég drepið mann eða hef ég ekki drepið mann? Hver hefur drepið mann og hver hefur ekki drepið mann? Hvenær drepur maður mann og hvenær drepur maður ekki mann? Fari í helvíti sem ég drap mann. Og þó.

That blasted family could never look at a living thing without wanting to make a profit out of it, preferably by killing it.

Among other things, the catechism said: "Ill treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart." The boy recited, "A hundred and eleven treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart.

I inherit the results of my acts of body, speech, and mind. My actions are my continuation.

Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict.

He felt like a criminal, though the only laws he'd broken were his own, and he wasn't sure which ones they were.

Papá me enseñó a coquetear con todo el mundo, chicas y chicos, y acabé por considerar el encanto -y no la cortesía o la franquza, o incluso la decencia- la principal virtud mundana

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a "completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him," the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial.

In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.

What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality—as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.

For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that it could happen in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.