Quotes About Ethics

Half the life of cities occurs at night,' Olive Lawrence warned us. 'There's a more uncertain morality then

As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, "How do you live?" And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, "I steal.

People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.

Kimse zenginler kadar kötü olamaz.

And that would be unconscionable, I suppose, to feel any obligation? Yes. Of course it would. Katherine cliffton The English Patient

The spiritual values that are essential to human happiness are being lost or made to seem trivial. Everything is buy, earn, sell

Sartre puts it, value arises simply from our choices. What we choose, we value simply because we have chosen it (and apparently we remain scot-free at any moment to nonvalue it by simply un-choosing it). In other words, we do not choose (in his view) because we see the value of something. We see the value of something because we have chosen it.

This, for many people, is what's most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

You have just dined," Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows. -Martin Renner

Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.

Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."*

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin

I wondered if this wasn't a case of making the ideal an enemy of the good, but Salatin was convinced that industrial organic was finally a contradiction in terms. I decided I had to find out if he was right.

how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since the creature that conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. we are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.