Quotes About Ethics

Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go.

People were strange like that. Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero.

While evidence says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they're probably all on first steps.

Do unto others before they do unto you.

The flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side.

Koan ninety-seven: Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you. Hmm. No real help there. Besides, he'd occasionally been unsure that he'd written that one down properly, although it certain had worked. He'd always left aquatic mammals well alone, and they had done the same to him.

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.

Everyone should occasionally break the law in some small and delightful way, Drumknott. It's good for the hygiene of the brain.

Sometimes life reaches that desperate point where the wrong thing to do has to be the right thing to do.

Sometimes what is legal isn't what is right, and sometimes it needs a witch to tell the difference.

Lawn looked down at his patient. In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?

What will you do?" said Susan. "Lie," said Lu-Tze happily. "It's amazing how often that works.

An' writin' even goes on sayin' a man's wurds after he's deid ! Ye cannae tell me that's right!

And there are those who would rather be behind evil than in front of it

The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong, you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live.

I mean, doesn't it change history even if you just tread on an ant?' 'For the ant, certainly,' said Qu.

Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?

Money is all you can think about when all you have is a price, Carrot said

Barbarism? Hah! When we kills people we do it there and then, lookin' 'em in the eye, and we'd be happy to buy 'em a drink in the next world, no harm done. I never knew a barbarian who cut up people slowly in little rooms, or tortured women to make 'em look pretty, or put poison in people's grub. Civilization? If that's civilization, you can shove it where the sun don't shine!

Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy.

Most people will shy away from killing people they haven't been introduced to.

Pray you never face a good man, Vimes thought. He'll kill you with hardly a word.

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

They're inventive, I'll grant you. But what I meant was...I mean...they've done nothing to deserve it." " Deserve? They're human . What's deserve got to do with it?