Quotes About Ethics

When you pollute a river, it's a supreme injustice to those who are downstream and those who live in the river who are not human beings.

It is not my responsibility to determine whether Mr. Kavanaugh deserves to sit on the Supreme Court. My responsibility is to tell the truth.

Members of the Supreme Court have lifetime tenures because they're not supposed to do politics.

Bullying wasn't okay in elementary school and it isn't okay now, especially when it comes in the form of a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians.

I have never endorsed Roy Moore. Just the fact that he was forced off the state supreme court is enough for me.

I just have to make sure I maintain my professionalism.

Do FBI Agents and FBI directors have political beliefs? Sure they do. But they're not supposed to act on them.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.

We all have our likes and our dislikes. But... when we're doing news - when we're doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we're doing the daily news, covering politics - it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.

One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.

I'm not sure I can say there is a clean line between me as an individual and me as a lawyer.

If I feel that somebody is hurting other people, then I'm going to make sure other people know - other people know about them.

Surely, nothing can be more dangerous than the doctrine that the moral obligations of men change with the latitude and longitude of a place.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

To despise riches, may, indeed, be philosophic, but to dispense them worthily, must surely be more beneficial to mankind.

Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young, as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.

There are surely times when a conservative and a liberal would agree. We would agree on how moral it is to discriminate on the basis of race. There's absolutely no light between those two positions. It becomes a little more complex when you talk about law as opposed to morality.

Part of the satisfaction of tattling surely comes from showing oneself to adults as a good moral agent, a responsible being who is sensitive to right and wrong. But I would bet that children would tattle even if they could do so only anonymously. They would do it just to have justice done.

If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just better not to ask, and better not to look.

People say, 'Surely there's the right reasons for going to war?' And my perspective is, 'Surely there's a better way of asking that question?'

If people learned what they were contributing to every time they ate meat, eggs, or dairy, surely they would be just as motivated as I was to change.

The grieving are surely owed our empathy, but capital punishment can neither right a wrong nor prevent another from happening.

Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface.