Quotes About Ethics

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote.

In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.

when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.

Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.

There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood.

All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it.

A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

Martha shut her eyes. She crossed her arms at her chest as if suddenly cold and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. She didn't understand how men could do those things. What things? he asked, and Martha said, The things men do. Then he nodded. It began to form. Oh, he said, those things.

O Facebook e o Google dizem-nos que os seus objetivos são louváveis: criar uma melhor experiência para o utilizador. Mas são também empresas, e a criação de uma melhor experiência para o utilizador está estritamente ligada a outra função de aptidão: ganhar dinheiro.

How can a business create more value for society than it captures for itself?

Is stealing stolen property less reprehensible than plain stealing?

To live you gotta be hard, I know that. But nobody wants to be a deadset cunt. That's just not fucking decent.

You need some ambition. What big ambition did you have, apart from wantin to be a hero? Nothin. I just wanted to be a good man. That's all I want.

God is what you do, not what you believe in.

firearm would be a dark presence I can do without under my own roof. Too much sinister potential. Too much unearnt power.

The dead by the road, or on it, testify to the presence of man. Their little gestures of pain—paws, wings and tails—are the saddest, the loneliest, most forlorn postures of the dead I can imagine. When we have stopped killing animals as though they were so much refuse, we will stop killing one another. But the highways show our indifference to death, so long as it is someone else's. It is an attitude of the human mind I do not grasp. ? Timothy Findley

When you see evil as a thing apart from yourself over there, you can fly a plane into it or destroy it with a powerful bomb. You can justify murder. Evil is the gaze that sees evil as a thing apart from me.

We are living textbooks on global warming and nuclear materials, crisscrosssed with interobjective calligraphy.

Holmes's experience in the war taught him not that all people have a right to freedom, but rather that claims about right and wrong are really only illusions.67 Ethical principles, he believed, are subjective, emotional commitments that cannot be judged right or wrong. Ideas such as justice or moral good are only the expressions of arbitrary personal preferences and are no more rational than a person's preference for one kind of beer over