Quotes About Ethics

Each of us constantly makes decisions about how to interact with other people, and each of those decisions has the potential to either harm or enhance the other person's well-being.

Wilson also makes a powerful point when he says that strong character leads to the integrated self—a joining of head and heart, where thoughts, feelings, and actions are in harmony, resulting in behavior that demonstrates the character of an individual who walks the talk of his or her belief system.

Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting.

What can it mean, 150 years after Darwin, to say that some species or communities are good and some are bad?

Tactics, fitness, stroke ability, adaptability, experience, and sportsmanship are all necessary for winning.

Bad profits are about extracting value from customers, not creating value.

The croupier at the roulette table does not claim that he knows something about the order in which the numbers will come up. He just sees to it that the bets are properly paid off and that the house isn't gypped - which is a job requiring competence.

The indignation school of writers never tires of pointing out the millions that are stolen in the Street. But while the millions are being stolen, the billions are being lost. Nothing crooked—just bad luck and bad brains met together in an effort to do something that couldn't be done in the first place.

The Punisher: If there are no consequences to your mistakes...there are no reason not to make them...

The Punisher: If there are no consequences to your mistakes...you have no reason...not to make them...

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?

Sic multa, quae honesta natura videntur esse, temporibus fiunt non honesta: facere promissa, stare conventis, reddere deposita, commutata utilitate, fiunt non honesta.

Quidquid est enim quod deceat, id tum apparet cum antegressa est honestas.

There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.

men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work.

But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others.

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

He wrangled late into the night with his senior tutor in theology over the concept of the doctrine of the lesser evil and the higher goal; that the end may justify the means and yet not damn the soul, providing the parameters of the impermissible are never breached.

based on the ordinary American's conviction of his God-given right to rape the globe's resources for his own comforts;

there is no collective guilt,...guilt is individual, like salvation." [p.28]

A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it.

He said that it was not his job to ensure that his soldiers died for their country. It was his job to make sure the other poor bastards died for theirs. Understand?

See Sean Coyle, "Thomas Hobbes and the Intellectual Origins of Legal Positivism," Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 16 (2003), 243–270; Mark Murphy, "Was Hobbes a Legal Positivist?," Ethics 105 (1995), 846–873.