Quotes About Ethics

Sometimes you need to lie make the world go around

The man I have loved as a brother, whose heart has ever been brimming with sympathy and friendship, cannot possibly partake of even a passive partnership in the butchery of innocent people.

Free people can handle liberty because they have developed character through exercising the restraint dictated by their virtues. They are not the slaves of their physical desires; rather, they train their bodies to behave in order to fulfill the higher desires created by their own virtues.

As you climb to success over the dead, don't alienate the living.

Now is a powerful time in this country for young people and others to be asking the question, What are we for? Do we exist for some reason other than competing with China or finding the best possible technological advances?

justice makes charity less necessary

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." In

I'm stretching my point only a bit when I say that in American life, every vision must begin and end in an economic argument in order to be heard, on urgent matters of human life: labor, education, immigration, refugees, prisons, poverty, health care. Rename

Shake hands, kids," Jack said. "Remember, humble in victory, gracious in defeat." He grinned up at her. "I feel very humble, don't you?

I have to believe that Adam was not the intended recipient of that hideous, disgusting picture. How do gynecologists do it all day, look between the legs of their patients and not just…just throw up?

I would rather be a poor man with honest friends than a rich man with none.

I also wonder about gold fever, why it make some men crazy and others wise. Such as Sam, my father, and Captain clinkingbeard They suffered heartbreak and loss just as Jesse Blue had, but they didn't become thieves or liars. Why? I asked papa. What makes the difference? His eyes were gentle when he looked at me. "It seems that true character of often isn't revealed until a person is faced with temptation".

There's a world I could do without: public underwear showings. There was a time in my lifetime when you had to open a J.C. Penney catalog to see people in their underwear. Now it's like the national pastime, hanging out in your underwear. I don't see why they have to pay anyone to model it.

Take the money, no take the money, but leave my stove out of it.

When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?

Vianne didn't hesitate. She knew now that no one could be neutral—not anymore—and as afraid as she was of risking Sophie's life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil, where a good woman could turn her back on a friend in need. She reached for the toddler, took him in her arms.

As soon as man was capable of conceiving of the idea of sin, he had recourse to psychic concealment.

So it comes about that there are many neurotics whose inner decency prevents them from being at one with present-day morality and who cannot adapt themselves so long as the moral code has gaps in it which it is of the crying need of our age to fill.

No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?

People have a moral standard about what they will do and will not do. At the end of the day someone who cheats has a lower moral standard than someone who does not. And they will cheat in other areas of life as well.

We have not yet learned the difference between yield and loot.

In his 1983 Templeton Prize address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered this summary explanation for why all the horrors of Soviet communism came to pass: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."1

Does human nature carry with it a moral structure and a specific end or purpose that remain constant over time and to which we must conform ourselves in order to flourish? Or are we simply the stuff of which we are made and beyond that free to be or do whatever we so choose? Pieces of living playdough attached to a will?

Doctors today, however, grant normative authority in such cases to inner feelings or psychological convictions.