Quotes About Ethics

Suffering is not virtue, nor does it make virtue, nor does of it virtue necessarily flow.

Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness – Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il's haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts.

It's hard to go through life without killing someone.

Life had begun to demand lies in order to be workable. And I was willing to tell one, or many more than one

Moral: to the extent you can choose, work on problems you think will be important.

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result—ruthlessness in political life.

Morality is as much an art as a science, and it calls for a certain versatility from us, the ability to improvise and respond to actual circumstances and particular situations.

Heinrich Himmler declared: 'Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations.

The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

The only problem they had ... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains; and criminal negligence-mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit.

Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armory when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded.

Lies are a precious currency—you have to be careful how and where you spend them.

Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you're no longer a soldier. You're just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.

They tell you to save the ship at all costs. No one ever talks about whether the passengers and crew deserve all that effort.

The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control. Quellcrist Falconer Ethics on the Precipice

He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.' 'Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he's unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.' She flinched. 'You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—' 'Four.' I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. 'I'm talking about four isolated incidents. And that's just this year.

Richard K. Morgan

The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control. Quellcrest Falconer Ethics on the Precipice

The cost of contemplating history is often an uneasy conscience.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'." — Theodore Roosevelt This is a famous quote that has been widely reprinted;

Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue.

Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren't treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you're on the right side?