Quotes About Ethics

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious convictions.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

In general, the problem with secularized mindfulness techniques is that when they find it convenient, they abandon—or at least put out of sight on the sidelines— the crucial ethical and religious contexts in which these Buddhist meditative practices have traditionally been embedded.

Something vital is lost when practices of mindfulness are transplanted from their original ethical and religious contexts into the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism with its primary aim of profit based on maximizing productivity and consumption.

Only temptation is divine.

Patrick had asked why people wanted to kill Mr. Sonnier. Because they say he killed people, Bill had answered. But, Dad, Patrick had asked, then who is going to kill them for killing him? (p. 60)

if we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well. And I end by challenging people to ask themselves whether we can continue to allow the government, subject as it is to every imaginable form of inefficiency and corruption, to have such power to kill. (p. 130)

The death penalty costs too much. Allowing our government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which this country was conceived: the inviolable dignity of human persons. (p. 197)

Who killed this man [Patrick Sonnier]? Nobody. Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job - the governor, the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man. (p. 101)

If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well.

The prospect that a person will be killed according to the policy he promulgates prompts the [priest] to urge clemency, an incomprehensible position logically.

Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

Zij geloofde aan een samenhang van alle verschijnselen, zonder echter een hogere macht aansprakelijk te stellen voor wat haar overkwam, zonder van een god persoonlijke bemoeienis met haar lot, troost, of loon naar werken te verwachten. Zij was er van overtuigd dat in de mens zelf de krachten ontstaan die men Goed en Kwaad noemt, en dat alleen door de ontwikkeling van het individuele bewustzijn de wil tot integriteit een menselijk gegeven wordt.

We do not sufficiently respect that anti-mephistoclean force which, like the mephistoclean one, threatens the balance of life: a force that constantly wishes what is good and constantly produces what is evil.

My shortcomings are no excuse for others acting in that way," Wallander said. "Not my superior in any case.

It is not so much the sight of immorality of the great that is to be feared as that of immorality leading to greatness. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE Democracy in America

Il concetto di giustizia non significa solo che le persone che commettono reati vengano condannate. Significa anche non arrendersi mai.

Wallander felt on the verge of misconduct.

When you battle with your conscience and lose, you win. -Henny Youngman, comedian and violinist (1906-1998)

The thought that human beings are considering saving lives by killing millions of their fellow human beings is so preposterous that the words 'saving life' have lost all of their meaning. One of the most tragic facts of our century is that this 'No' to nuclear weapons has been spoken so seldom, so softly, and by so few.

It is folly for a man who has a dead person in his house to leave him there and go to weep over his neighbor's dead."6

I think [Robert E.] Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man, had a good character, and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.