Quotes About Ethics

What I want most of all is that you live in uprightness and freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that may be. —Robert Scholl

stolen property vanishes because somebody has taken it; that a murdered man dies because somebody has killed him.

After reading the Qur'an, I realized that I couldn't possibly endorse Islam as a religion, as a philosophy, as a moral standard, as an ethical code, or even as useful fiction. I determined that these philosophies and this image of Allah could only come from an extremely warped and disturbed person who suffered from an aggregation of the most severe and profound human weaknesses.

Never has a book been as sorely misused as the Bible to justify beatings.

For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate—in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them.

One estimate in 1906 was that for every one of the 150,000 doctors in the U.S. there was one castrated woman; some of these doctors boasted that they had removed from 1500 to 2000 ovaries apiece." Soon feminists and antivivisectionists protested against the credo "when in doubt, take them out.

Morality's like mink," I said. "It's great if you can afford it.

one should stick to one's principles and never compromise them just to do the done thing!

It's not enough to do one's best. One should do what one knows to be right

A man of honor does swiftly that which must be done.

CONFIDENTIALITY 1. Find out if, and under what circumstances, you are required by law not to maintain confidentiality.

Never agree to a job interview in which the interviewer has seen you naked.

If he'd tossed her to the ground and started ripping off her clothes, instead of being outraged, she would have helped. She would have done it right there, in front of God and the goats.

Being a good man has nothing to do with how many touchdowns you score. But maybe, rather, how you play the game.

Sages of the past would say we are—all of us—just imperfect people on a flawed planet who are trying to hold on to what is good and lovely and right.

God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.

Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.

Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive.

the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.

Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.

Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. It often means not knowing if you ever get it right.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence.

Art is seduction, not rape.

I live in an unethical society that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don't enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt, decadent. I, from my side, can't deny the immense richness of these pleasures, or my addiction to them.