Quotes About Ethics

An honest God's the noblest work of man.

Kill a man's family, and he may brook it, But keep your hands out of his breeches' pocket.

Good manners and good morals are sworn friends and fast allies.

The rewards and punishments of the moral laws of nature therefore require additional supports. Something else is needed, and that something else comes in two forms: first, there are social sanctions, or what Locke calls "the law of opinion or reputation"; and, second, there are civil sanctions that Locke designates as "civil law."52

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

Self-betrayal occurs when we do to another what we sense we should not do or don't do what we sense we should. Thus self-betrayal is a sort of moral self-compromise, a violation of our own personal sense of how we ought to be and what we ought to do.

La autotraición se produce cuando actuamos en contra de esos sentimientos que acabamos de describir, cuando hacemos a los demás lo contrario de lo que sentimos que debemos hacer o cuando no hacemos lo que sentimos que debemos hacer.

A sword may be surrendered with more grace and dignity than a point of view.

When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.

Words like "Society" and "State" are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the "State," far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the "State" is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities.

It is not that present-day man is capable of greater evil than the man of antiquity or the primitive. He merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his propensity to evil.

The ideas of the moral order and of God belong to the ineradicable substrate of the human soul.

All these guiding principles in therapy confront the doctor with important ethical duties which can be summed up in the single rule: be the man through whom you wish to influence others.

We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all. We do not take the trouble to understand them, let alone draw ethical conclusions from them. This stopping-short conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious.

The intellect is undeniably useful in its own field, but is a great cheat and illusionist outside of it whenever it tries to manipulate values.

Tik saugok Dieve nuo bet kokios psichologijos, juk per tok? ištvirkim? dar imsi ir pažinsi save!

perhaps an equally dangerous, bewitching power resides in good as in evil. Essentially, the good needs to be regarded as an inherently no-less-dangerous principle than evil.

An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing, not infused by any archaic-infantile driving force, is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea. . . .

Unless he stands on his own feet the so-called objective values profit him nothing since they only serve as a substitute for character

We push one another into vice. And how can a man be recalled to salvation, when he has none to restrain him, and all mankind to urge him on? …