Quotes About Ethics

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer.

To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism.

Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth.

In the majority of sane human lives there is no problem of sex at all; there is no problem of marriage at all; there is no problem of temperament at all; for all these problems are dwarfed and rendered ridiculous by the standing problem of being a moderately honest man and paying the butcher.

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, My mother, drunk or sober.

Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.

One don't like setting out to help to bring a man to the gallus when you have got his money in your pocket.

Science is all very well when a man can afford to make it his hobby, but I have come to the conclusion that a man has no right to ride a hobby while his family have to work to make a living." "But

I reckon it is up to us to treat each other better than the Lord do, and teach Him a lesson.

a science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life...

You must learn not what people round you consider good or bad, but to act in life as your conscience bids you. An untrammelled conscience will always know more than all the books and teachers put together.

Only he will deserve the name of "man" and can count upon anything prepared for them from above, who has already acquired corresponding data for being able to preserve intact both the wolf and the sheep entrusted to his care.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

the schoolmaster was one of those men for whom virtuous indignation was a necessity.

Some of his colleagues, as he was well aware, even went so far as to say he dishonoured the medical profession. As though it could be dishonoured! There is pain and sickness, agreed. But pain and sickness represent money, and you need money to live, to feel well and look after others. That is the inevitable cycle. When it comes to money, it is difficult to strike a happy mean and stick to it. You either make too much money, or too little. It is safer to make too much.

Con?tiin?a e spa?iul fic?ional în care r?ul f?cut altuia este imaginat analogic ca r?u suferit pe cont propriu.

Socrates. The whole Socratic problematics of 'to know' (to think you know, to know that you do not know, to know that it is possible to know or that it is possible to try to know, etc.), on which ultimately depends the way we choose our lives, seemed to Dragomir to be the supreme enigma of philosophy, and the thing to which it was worth dedicating your life.

Supravie?uim moral prin convingerea, pe care nici o mâr??vie comis? nu ne-o anuleaz?, c? suntem mai buni ca ceilal?i.