Quotes About Ethics

One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist church.

Don't talk to me about civility when you're separating families at the border.

War is not civilized.

Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'

If you think about it, just the psychology of the superhero is, 'Because I can, I should protect people, and I should put bad guys away, and I should defend society.' But you're forming your own justice. There's no judge and jury here: you are it. That, in and of itself, is a very complicated way of looking at morality.

Most superheroes are painted with a specific moral objective that makes them who they are. And that moral objective influences everything they do, so there's an expectation for what you're going to see out of a certain character.

If we are allowed to do experiments on monkeys because we are superior to them in a certain way, then someone who is superior to me is allowed to do experiments on me.

Resentment is not morally superior to earning money.

No one man is superior to the game.

Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.

Michael Vick may enjoy watching dogs fight. Someone else may find that repulsive but see nothing wrong with eating an animal who has had a life as full of pain and suffering as the lives of the fighting dogs. It's strange that we regard the latter as morally different from, and superior to, the former.

For storytellers, financiers make ideal rogues. The easiest way to make characters unappealing is to make them rich - shorthand for spoiled, picky, superior, and cold-hearted.

To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce. When we kick off a merchant, we're asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code?

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.

There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority.

I don't believe that there's a good guy and a bad guy. Unless it's like Superman or Batman, there is no good guy and bad guy.

By no means am I as moral as Clark Kent, by no means at all. I made a lot of mistakes and done a lot of things that are in no way, shape, or form Superman- or Clark Kent-esque. But generally, I live my life that way and try to.

What's special about Superman is that he will always make the right choice.

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.

You can't run a football club as if it was a supermarket.

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.

It's one thing if a politician in a small country says a little bit of torturing is good to do. There is a qualitative difference... when it's a candidate to run a superpower.