Quotes About Ethics

A company is judged by the president it keeps.

No member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

Knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.

Obscenity is whatever gives a judge an erection.

Good, but not religious-good.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.

Character is long-standing habit.

If you think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.

Character is what God and the angels know of us; reputation is what men and women think of us.

If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of itself.

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.

He's an honest man - you could shoot craps with him over the telephone.

The man whose conscience never troubles him must have it pretty well trained.

Conscience is a treacherous thing, and mine behaves badly whenever there is a serious danger of being found out.

The great hope of society is individual character.

Only what we have wrought into our character during life can we take away with us.

Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No', said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?'

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

Morality, like physical cleanliness, is not acquired once and for all: it can only be kept and renewed by a habit of constant watchfulness and discipline.