Quotes About Ethics

Madam, if your son were to come home and try to shirk duty, you ought to shut your door in his face and treat him as a renegade unworthy of your name or regard.

God hates violence. He has ordained that all men fairly possess their property, not seize it.

There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.

There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters?

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

There is a real split today between those who push the button and those who do the dying.

Ethical obligation has to subordinate itself to the totalitarian nature of war.

Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable?

The nature of man is such that people consider themselves put under an obligation as much by the benefits they confer as by those they receive.

War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.

We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.

A wrong war brings wrong; so does a right war.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.

The princes who have done great things are the ones who have taken little account of their promises.

All our rulers have said that war is unthinkable, and then we think about it almost all the time. We've got to make it unthinkable.

If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.

Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.

There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.

You've got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you're going to hit civilians.