Quotes About Ethics

Modesty is not a bad habit, after all," the priest said. "Although humility would be better.

It's man's most basic and sacred stewardship-to serve as the guardian of his own behavior. And it's man's blackest and most fundamental evil to try and overthrow that stewardship

I'm beginning to feel that same absolute determination that we cannot -must not!- simply sit back and accept cruelty and injustice. If we do, we become part of it.

Our planet cannot continue to be a life-giving environment unless human beings quickly become much more responsible stewards of the created world.

Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I

To forgive or forget the crimes of Josef Mengele would require the amputation of our conscience and the dismemberment of our memory.

John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, "hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church's accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements."65

And a popular priest, Father Dyonisy Juricev, wrote in a leading newspaper that it was no longer a sin to kill Serbs or Jews so long as they were at least seven years old.

Thirty-four companies—many of them still household names today, like Krupp, AEG Telefunken, Siemens, Bayer, and IG Farben—made fortunes from the tortured labor of Jews, Russians, Poles, some Allied prisoners of war, and German prisoners of conscience.

Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.

when law is isolated and exalted into an independent system of religion, it becomes demonic.

No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility.

Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)

In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honour from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically subhuman and dishonourable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult.

Nothing illegal. Just the business itself—racing horses before they should even be ridden, wrecking their bones before they've finished growing.

The true test of character is ... how we behave when we don't know what to do.

He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set; on the contrary, he who imitates what is good always falls short.

Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water, like Pilate.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

The true opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Hate, bad as it is, at least treats the neighbour as a thou, whereas indifference turns the neighbour into an it, a thing. This is why we may say that there is actually one thing worse than evil itself and that is indifference to evil. In human relations the nadir of morality, the lowest point as far as Christian ethics is concerned, is manifest in the phrase, T couldn't care less.'

There is but one blasphemy, and that is injustice.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.

Good is when I steal other people's wives and cattle; bad is when they steal mine.