Quotes About Ethics

A lawyer's truth is not Truth. It is consistency, or consistent expediency

As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them? that it was a vain endeavor?

No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.

By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down.

La loi n'a jamais rendu les hommes plus justes d'un iota ; et, à cause du respect qu'ils lui marquent, les êtres bien disposés eux-même deviennent les agents de l'injustice.

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it.

There is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.

Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

I will not through humility become the devil's attorney

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

No puedo creer que nuestro sistema industrial sea el mejor modo por el que podamos vestirnos. La condición de los obreros se parece cada día más a la de los ingleses y no hay que sorprenderse, ya que, por lo que he oído y observado, el objetivo principal no es que la humanidad esté bien y honestamente vestida, sino, indudablemente, que las corporaciones se enriquezcan.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.