Quotes About Ethics

Between the covers, a book can be a sin.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear." —Socrates

The men the Americans now call 'the Greatest Generation' were not all the selfless heroes they are often portrayed to be: a proportion of them were also thieves, plunderers and abusers of the worst kind.

No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

All aspects of honor derive from honesty. A liar cannot truly be honorable, for where is the honor in deception?

Life was, in fact, cheap. If life was such a glorious, magnificent, wonderful thing, then it wouldn't be so easy to take it away. If life was a great gift, then he wouldn't be able to kill a fellow human being with one hand...

You realized that you were really in one of the sleaziest businesses there is, without actually being a gangster. It was a business where the only time people laughed was when they'd screwed someone else over.

Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money

Caro, you're a pretty girl, but I'd no sooner fuck a good waitress than I'd key my own car

but my stomach rebelled anew at the sight of the separated chicken leg on my plate, the white knob of bone glistening through the cooked tendons. It didn't look like food. It looked like a piece of a dismembered corpse. Eating it, I knew, was a practical impossibility.

When we feel deprived we try to make it right, and that makes it easier to rationalize our behavior. It's easier to say I need this. I deserve this. But Patanjali says the opposite is true: If we don't take what isn't ours (asteya), we will flourish.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ice cream.

I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

I would like to end world hunger and create world peace, stop corruption, stop drugs getting to kids.

what is needed in Russia is moral reform, and until that happens, Russia will not change.

We believe we can create a chimera virus," he said, elliptically.

Too little temptation can lead to virtue.

A politician don't steal elections, he pays for 'em.

Don't point a gun at nobody you ain't willin' to shoot, if necessary.

When you scalp a man more'n once, you begin to run out of hide.

Lawyers get you out'n the kind of trouble you'd never get in if there was no lawyers.

Institutions that do not recognize that their officers' incentives are not consistent with the goals of the institution will necessarily be corrupted in the long run.

He had that basic integrity that is so rare as to be mistaken for altruism.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.