Quotes About Ethics

People don't believe in consequences anymore.

As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.

If you inhabited a world and a colony of tongueless people landed, would you consent to having your tongue cut out so that you could be like them?

People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights.

How many sentences have I seen more criminal than the crime…

It is taking one's conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them.

Benim bütün çabam kimseye muhtaç olmadan yaÅŸamakt?r. Ä°nsanlar hiçbir ÅŸeyimi almazlarsa, bana çok ÅŸey vermiÅŸ olurlar. Hiçbir kötülük etmezlerse, yeterince iyilik etmiÅŸ olurlar.

Platon, Devlet'inde ak?lca ve ruhça zay?f olanlara tart??may? yasak etmiÅŸtir. DoÄŸru dürüst ad?m at?p yürümesini bilmeyen bir insanla gerçeÄŸi aramaya ç?kman?n anlam? var m??

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice

We ought to desire whatever is really good for us and nothing else.

Inter-denominational violence' is generally based upon the essentially atheistic greed for more land, power, and money.

For law can be just or unjust. Dr. Huey P. Newton said, "The law must serve men; not men serve the law." John Africa, founder of the MOVE Organization, said, "Just because it's legal doesn't make it right.

I don't really know if it's the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more ocean fronts filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?

I had a sense he was offering things abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or coitus interruptus

A woman may be beautiful but have poor character. A man may be a business genius, making money left and right, but lack common courtesy, sensitivity, and compassion.

He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.

We are not men of hate, but we must be men of justice.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

When u are small, u can choose which way to grow. If you are kind and decent, you grow into a kind and decent man. And if you are like El Patron . . . Just think about it." – Tam Lin

If you don't fix wrongs in time , they'll never go away !

Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing then anything? ...The question gaped beneath her, but she didn't try to evade it. I don't know. I just know we do.

Sonia's terribly fond of juggling with people's lives. I never shall forget when she made me go to her doctor...I can only say he very nearly killed me. It's not her fault if I'm here today. She's entirely unscrupulous. She gets a hold over people much too easily, with her charm and her prestige, and then forces her own values on them.

The human instinct for self-preservation is strong. I know, because mine pulls at me, too, like the needle on a compass. And everybody - I've been reading some philosophy - everybody seems to agree that the instinct and responsibility of all humans is to take care of themselves first. You have the right to self-defense. You have the right to survive, if you can.

When Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld conflate what is good for Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and Gilead with what is good for the United States and indeed the world, it is a form of projection with uniquely dangerous consequences.