Quotes About Ethics

When you're dead set on doing the right thing, sometimes it's hard to recognize that you're doing it in the wrong way.

With little power comes little responsibility.

You keep using that term, 'the enemy.' But you taught me that euphemisms are only for those who feel guilt about what they are describing.

Commitment doesn't have conditions. A compassionate samurai follows through whether it feels good or not; average people do what they feel like doing.

You won't further the cause of human rights by walking away with your morals intact. Change is about getting your hand dirty.

Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty, together.

Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.

Live your life in every way to earn and keep the respect of the people you respect.

Discipline yourself to act every minute of the day as if everyone were watching you.

There are, basically, three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character.

Aristotelian

Guard your integrity as a sacred thing; nothing at last is sacred except the integrity of your own mind.

When you choose the higher value over the lower, the more difficult over the easy, the right over the wrong, you feel good about yourself. Your self-esteem increases. You like and respect yourself more. You have a greater sense of personal pride.

In addition to feeling excellent about yourself when you behave with character, you also earn the respect and esteem of all the people around you. They will look up to you and admire you. Doors will be opened for you. People will help you. You will be paid more, promoted faster, and given even greater responsibilities. As you become a person of honor and character, opportunities will appear all around you.

It is only when you are under pressure- when you are forced to choose one way or another, to either live consistently with a value or to compromise it- that you demonstrate your true character...Every choice you make is a statement about your true values and priorities.

What terrifies us is what might happen if you learn to use your full intelligence before you become truly civilized. Stars above! If you people find your way into space before you fix whatever's wrong with your spirits, the damage you'd wreak could make what you've done to your own planet look like a forest rangers' picnic.

There would not be much left if every useful thing that could be turned to bad ends were destroyed.

Religion, Gardner continued, gives us eyes to see and ears to hear in ways that science simply cannot. "With our scientific eyes we can distinguish between true and false. With our religious eyes we can distinguish between right and wrong. When we see with our religious eyes, we live in a world of meaning.

That's just the trouble really. Nobody's shocked by anything anymore; we're not shocked by deceit, cruelty, lust for power, faithlessness, money-grubbing. Indeed, we accept it as inevitable that each and every one of our fellow men should be impelled only by selfishness. Well, sir, let me say that it's stupid of us not to be shocked, because the continuation of our civilisation depends precisely upon our ability to be shocked.

Every little betrayal, every little rhyming of conviction and convenience, every little selfishness, every little preference of immediate comfort to ultimate good hastens the coming of the next war.

Twenty-five thousand black bears a year were slaughtered to make hats for the British Army, and fashionable London ladies liked their hummingbirds skinned alive, a technique which apparently added lustre to the chapeau.

It's not what a man does, it's what a man is that counts!

The fear of everybody was that the man might give in and say, After all, it's her life. However a thing like that is not permitted in Nigeria; you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community and not just to him or her.

In Tracer Shells, 2002, forty-six cats with bright-white fluron-tipped tails, leap over upturned chairs and tables (depicting social chaos) in response to rapid bursts of recorded machine-gun fire. In the darkened space the effect is startling, the message disturbing, and the method ethically challenging.