Quotes About Ethics

How can a man be worthy as an educator if he have a natural, incorrigible penchant for the abyss? Much as we renounce it and seek dignity, we are drawn to it.

Lyotard remarked that post-Modern artists often function as philosophers. They may deal with issues of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as many influential critics today approach art through philosophy.

The end of the world will be legal.

We never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy.

In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.

The point where you become free not to kill, not to exploit, not to destroy, not to compete, because you are no longer afraid of death or the devil or poverty or failure. If you discover this nakedness, you'd better keep it private. People don't like it.

Cracking the safe (excerpt) A poor man must swing For stealing a belt buckle But if a rich man steals a whole state He is acclaimed As statesmen of the year . . . Moral: the more you pile up ethical principles And duties and obligations To bring everyone in line The more you gather loot For a thief like Khang. By ethical argument And moral principle The greatest crimes are eventually shown To have been necessary, and, in fact, A signal benefit To mankind.

As a matter of fact, it is often harder to manifest the good that is in us than the evil.

The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. Christianity, by its very nature, demands such a revolution. If Christians would all live up to what they profess to believe, the revolution would happen.

I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.

The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.

There are crimes that no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good'.

In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated.

alone I would never really get to understand it. I believed in the beautiful myth about having a good time so long as it does not hurt anybody else.

The immature conscience is one that bases its judgments partly, or even entirely, on the way other people seem to be disposed toward its decisions. The good is what is admired or accepted by the people it lives with. The evil is what irritates or upsets them. Even

Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy.

Excerpt from Cracking the Safe: Thus what the world calls good business is only a way To gather up the loot, pack it, make it secure In one convenient load for the more enterprising thieves. Who is there, among those called smart, Who does not spend his time amassing loot For a bigger robber than himself?

we follow nothing but our natures, our own philosophies, our own level of ethics, we will end up in hell.

Half the civilized world makes a living by telling lies. Advertising, propaganda, and all the other forms of publicity that have taken the place of truth have taught men to take it for granted that they can tell other people whatever they like provided that it sounds plausible and evokes some kind of shallow emotional response.

The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

ANOTHER characteristic of the devil's moral theology is the exaggeration of all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions.

But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to a public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.

Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.

A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.