Quotes About Ethics

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority

is not what subjects do but for whom they are doing it that counts.

we sometimes have a choice among authorities, and we ought to look at this phenomenon within the experiment. It is possible that when different authorities simultaneously call for opposing lines of action, a person's own values will prevail and determine which authority he follows. Or

Subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed into action.

The claim 'I was only following orders' has been used to justify too many tragedies in our history.

Helping the terminally ill to consciously end their lives is a crime, while denying health care to the living is seen as sound fiscal practice.

Corruption should be investigated. I wont be First!

A man could shoot thirty ducks if it pleased him, and then shoot thirty more the next day, and it was perfectly legal. His hunting partner was likely to be the county sheriff.

We behave morally when we improve the lives of all we can affect.

be a human being first and a scientist second.

No one acts altruistically without regard to the costs.

She and her daughter between them killed and ate as many as ten infants.

I realized I wanted a just world here on earth, not a just paradise somewhere else.

An exercise in power should never be merely and indulgence.

The herd instinct of the mob was not yet as offensively powerful in public life as it is today; freedom in what you did or did not do in private life was taken for granted - which is hardly imaginable now - and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as a weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force.

Mutluyken adil davranmak, mutsuzken adil davranmaktan daima daha kolayd?r. syf- 160

Tarihte bir baÅŸar?n?n ahlaki deÄŸeri asla pratik faydas?yla ölçülmez, insanl??a kal?c? bir zenginlik katanlar, insanl???n bilgisini çoÄŸalt?p yarat?c? gücünü artt?ranlard?r. syf-230

It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: "How should I live?

A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.