Quotes About Ethics

Animals have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance. There is something so very dreadful in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.

Der ganze Styl seiner Darbiethung erinnerte zwingend an die emotionalen, von einer gänzlich falschen Gnadenlehre inspirierten Predigten gewisser Sectirer, denen noch nicht einmal das Civürecht einen Platz in unserem Gemeinwesen einräumt.

The critical issues here concern what is right, what is just -- not the balancing of benefits.

It is too late for a politics based on law alone, too soon for a politics of grace which sublimates instinct.

The danger of academic life, thought Wittgenstein, is that we are encouraged to go on talking even when we know in our hearts that we have nothing valuable to say.

This is not something you or I do. This is something the poor do so that the rich get better drugs.

Medical care is neither a right nor a privilege: it is a service provided by doctors and other to people who wish to purchase it.

Meanwhile, our patchwork regulatory system insures that no single institution is keeping track of how many deaths and injuries befall healthy subjects in clinical trials. Nobody appears to be tracking how many clinical investigators are incompetent of have lost their licenses, or have questionable disciplinary records.. Nobody is monitoring the effect that so many trials have on the health of professional guinea pigs. In fact, nobody is even certain whether the trials generate reliable data.

Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.

Sometimes you're going to be faced with situations where the line isn't clear between what's right and what's wrong.Your heart will tell you to do one thing and your brain will tell you to do something different. In the end, all that's left is to look at both sides and go with your best judgment.

Roy remembered the time he and his father had a talk about fighting. 'It's important to stand up for what's right,' Mr. Eberhardt had said, 'but sometimes there's a fine line between courage and stupidity.

Just because something was legal didn't automatically make it right.

Please don't grow up to be one of those men who lie for the sport of it, and most men do. That's a fact. That's why the world is so messed up, Noah. That's why history books are full of so much heartache, and tragedy. Politicians, dictators, kings, phoney-baloney preachers-most of 'em are men, and most of 'em lie like rugs

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep

Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.

Ethical decision is possible only when one is conscious of the conflict in all its aspects.

There is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good.

responsibly

May I be mindful both making and keeping commitments that they be springboards to liberation, instead of suffering, for all sentient beings.

Si nuestra sociedad tuviera la oportunidad de ser voyeur por un día, abordaría la vida de manera muy distinta a como lo hace ahora.

While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography.

And so there is nothing new in Thy Neighbor's Wife. Nor is there anything old.

In Connecticut the crime of oral sex could be punishable by a thirty-year jail term. In Ohio it was one to twenty years. In Georgia such a "crime against nature" could lead a practitioner to life imprisonment at hard labor- a penalty far more severe than having sex with animals, which in Georgia was punishable by only five years.

Gerald Foos's explanation in his journal--he was 'only an observer and not a reporter,' and he 'really didn't exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned'--were explanations that didn't surprise me because of his often-expressed notion that he was a fractured individual, a hybridized combination of the Voyeur and Gerald Foos