Quotes About Ethics

Glory, built on selfish principles, is shame and guilt.

I did only what my duty demanded. I could have taken no other course without dishonor.

We have guided missiles and misguided men.

War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.

The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.

In the name of God and humanity I protest!

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

We shall never be able to effect physical disarmament until we have succeeded in effecting moral disarmament.

I never thought that my creation, would allow brothers to kill brothers. (after seeing his invention being used in war, The Airplane) Alberto Santos-Dumont

Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.

Slavery can never be abolished.

I do not feel guilty of any war crimes, I have only done my duty as an intelligence organ, and I refuse to serve as an ersatz for Himmler.

One makes war to win, not because it's just.

This war no longer has anything to do with knightly conduct or with the agreements of the Geneva Convention.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do - but it does not keep him from doing it.

Go ahead and gamble a lie. A person who will not tell you seven lies within a hundred yards is useless as a man.

Those who excel in war first cultivate their own humanity and and maintain their laws and institutions. By these means they make their governments invincible.

War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. That's what terrorists are about.

In war, as in politics, no evil - even if it is permissible under the rules - is excusable unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything beyond that is a crime.