Quotes About Ethics

Why did criminals have so many rights? Why were they entitled to respect and understanding? Had they not acted so unlawfully that these rights should be stripped from them?

How can you know you're a good person if your life has been nothing but plain sailing?

But society is going to fall apart if we stop reporting crime.

Society has made it so I have to get paid in order to do basic things like eat and be indoors and not be naked. Once that's happened, morality's bound to get slippery.

I'm a very truthful person, but if the greater good is best served by a lie then I'll tell it.

Faith is never identical with "piety" even if it were the purest and finest.

Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.

The sin is in our thoughts.

Metaphysical guilt is the lack of absolute solidarity with the human being as such--an indelible claim beyond morally meaningful duty. This solidarity is violated by my presence at a wrong or a crime. It is not enough that I cautiously risk my life to prevent it; if it happens, and I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive.

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.

True virtue consists in the care for the common weal, it can only flourish where the commonwealth at the same time advances the interests of the individual, where he cannot damage the commonwealth without damaging himself.

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

Soldiers who don't know what they're fighting for know, nevertheless, what they're not fighting for.

Progress makes purses out of human skin.

Der Teufel ist ein Optimist, wenn er meint er könnte den Menschen schlechter machen.

[D]rugs being tested on animals. That sort of thing, well, it depends, doesn't it? If the drug's aspirin and the monkey's got a headache, is it tight?

the selfish gladly consoled themselves with the thought that though it was merciful at least it was not liberal;

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle - the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.

a rational analysis of the consequences of a decision does not make the decision rational; the consequences do not determine our decision; it is always we who decide.

What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.

Relativism is one of the many crimes committed by intellectuals. It is a betrayal of reason and of humanity.