Quotes About Ethics

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."29

Whenever my behavior is biologically determined or socially conditioned, it is not truly free. To act freely, according to Kant, is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law I give myself—not according to the dictates of nature or social convention.

Philosophy is a distancing, if not debilitating, activity.

When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. "I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.

The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody

My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.

It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.

A man got to have a code. - Omar Little

The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.

What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: "One hand, one million dollars, no tears.

Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.

When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off

The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became—though even to use words like "corrupt" and "sinister" made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them.

some broker somewhere took out a handsome fee for himself, without necessarily doing much work.

Don't worry. You gave him the right answer." Actually, Michael was after something more important than the fate of his Briarcrest teammate. "I wanted to see what type of person he was," he said later. "If he's pulling scholarships that they'd promised kids, would you want to play for that kind of person? Be around that kind of person?" Coach O wasn't that kind of person, he decided; more interestingly, Coach

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

Goldman Sachs did not leave the house before it began to burn; it was merely the first to dash through the exit—and then it closed the door behind it.

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.

when I ran mortgages, I religiously took people from the back office. At first I did it for moral reasons. But it worked. They appreciated it. They didn't feel like the world owed them a living. They were more loyal.

Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the "good things that ultimately don't matter to most businesses" there is a tycoon struggling to get out.

It's the worldview in which if people tip in a restaurant to which they will never return it counts as a puzzle.

Wing Chau didn't know he'd been handpicked by Greg Lippmann to persuade Steve Eisman that the people on the other end of his credit default swaps were either crooks or morons, but he played the role anyway.