Quotes About Ethics

why the desire to increase and retain one's own earnings should be characterized negatively as "greed," while wishing to live at the expense of others is not.

Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which "a duty to die" is just one.

But, as the late Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler put it, "the typical university catalog would never stop Diogenes in his search for an honest man."25

I am poor - obscure - just eighteen years of age - with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse.

business corporations may be said to possess religious belief systems and enjoy the right of freedom of conscience.

you have to tell lots of little lies to promote one big lie.

The religious right is quick to extol the principle of free speech when it comes to, say, public school officials preaching to children in their care or shouting at women through bullhorns outside of reproductive health clinics. And yet they are eager to regulate and restrict the speech of medical professionals delivering reproductive health services.

There is no official count of the number of pregnant women who have turned to Catholic hospitals and clinics when something goes wrong, only to be denied the medical care they need.

Some of his extreme positions, such as the idea that homosexuals, blasphemers, adulterers, incorrigible teenagers, and practitioners of "witchcraft" are all worthy of the death penalty, have been loudly repudiated by many conservative religious leaders.

The Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church unanimously resolved "that slavery, as it exists in the United States, is not a moral evil.

In America today, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the financial pathways that lead from the public coffers to mega-preachers' lives of bounty.

the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right's real motive: protecting segregated schools.

We have heard the single-issue, pro-life or -death refrain so many times that we no longer remember a time when America's houses of worship, including conservative ones, tended to approach a vast range of issues that affect our society with the humility and appreciation of their complexity that is their due.

Betsy DeVos's brother, Erik Prince, founded the private contracting firm Blackwater

An aim of the movement, it would seem, is to turn houses of worship into the cash machines of the political system by allowing special interests to pour millions of tax-free dollars into churches, which could then turn around and spend like super PACs to elect or defeat candidates.

The books he read were "humanistic garbage," devoid of wisdom. The ancient classics were, as he later said, "classics of depravity. Classics of degenerate cultures. What they offer at their best is evil.

Go out into the world and do well; but more importantly—go out into the world and do good.

Existe a vingança e existe a justiça. Às vezes as duas são uma só.

We decide ourselves whether to do right or wrong, whether to be good or evil. For some, it is fear that keeps them within the law, but for others it is a greater sense of good. I do not think any religion can make a person good, or protect a good person from bad happening to him.

Conscience is that still, small voice that yells so loud the morning after." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps it is our obligation to be noble before it is our obligation to be happy.

Nothing is worth the loss of one's conscience, or the ability to do what is right.

Tobacco, banjo playing, and dominoes do not figure in the Decalogue as recorded in the Book of Exodus. But particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Christians have been adept, and remarkably inventive, at interpreting God's commandments to cover just about anything they don't approve of. The effect, of course, is to make the surpassingly large God of the scriptures into a petty Cosmic Patrolman.

Character isn't built, it's bred.