Quotes About Ethics

A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job.

Well, the role of money in politics is pretty corrupting right now.

Power is a dangerous thing,' said Ben Aruva in a quiet voice. 'Any kind of power. If you have it, be careful to use it for good.

If we all allow ourselves to feel the unconscious, divine, kinky pleasure we've been suppressing, then we are left with just our intelligence to guide our decisions, and that's great. Your own intelligence and consciously chosen principles are a much better ethical compass than your reactive feelings of guilt.

There isn't a definite right and wrong anyway. Sometimes we do what seems wrong, but we have good reasons for doing it, so it's not wrong after all.

Why is it that STUPIDITY is not one of the Deadly Sins?

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

I mean, weird and grumpy as he might have been, he wasn't a bad human. He was much more on the good side of the bad/good human graph. He was bad and good, like most people. A good person who does bad things or a bad person who does good things—as long as people are involved, people will do bad or good things to them.

Well, when the Enquirer becomes your standard for living, you're in a lot of trouble! When

he wasn't a bad human. He was much more on the good side of the bad/good human graph. He was bad and good, like most people. A good person who does bad things or a bad person who does good things—as long as people are involved, people will do bad or good things to them. Especially when there's money

We are not defined by our species any more than our nationality or our gender. What we do , our choices, that's what defines us.

Friedrich Nietzsche says, "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.

All right. I'll bite. Here's what I think, with the caveat that I may be wrong. I think we're here to make the world a better place than we found it. I think we don't always deserve the cards we're dealt, good or bad. But we are judged by how we play the cards we're dealt. Those of us with a bum deal that makes it harder to do good -- we just have to work a little more is all. There's no destiny. There's just muddling through without doing to much damage.

Them that live by the gun should die by the gun, is good sound twentieth century gospel.

An unused conscience is no conscience at all.

By their peculiar "reasoning," too, theologians have sanctioned most of the ills of the ages. They justified the Inquisition, serfdom, and slavery. Theologians of our time defend segregation and the annihilation of one race by the other. They have drifted away from righteousness into an effort to make wrong seem to be right.

It has been said that the Negroes do not connect morals with religion. The historian would like to know what race or nation does such a thing. Certainly the whites with whom the Negroes have come into contact have not done so.

We are not proving ourselves spiritually worthy of our material progress. We have not been neighborly, courteous, and kind upon the highway. Our lack of decency toward our fellow men is a definite black mark against us.

So it was that I justified my morals and ethics. Everything became relative.

Technology has allowed...our society to separate itself from the sights and the sounds of killing.... It must be easy to kill from a roomful of fluorescent lights and wash-and-wear shirts.

The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It's that they stay out all night looking for it.

Ace Running a casino is like robbing a bank with no cops around. For guys like me, Las Vegas washes away your sins. It's like a morality car wash.

If manipulation really does increase welfare, then it would seem to be justified and even mandatory on ethical grounds.

But it is true that in its usual forms, consequentialism seems to conflict with some of our deepest intuitions, certainly in new or unfamiliar situations.2 For example, human beings appear to be intuitive retributivists; they want wrongdoers to suffer. With respect to punishment, efforts to encourage people to think in consequentialist terms do not fare at all well.3