Quotes About Ethics

But who, except God, can say whether a man is right or foolish if he follows the call of his conscience?

Has a man the right to kill himself? Yes, if his death harms no one and if life is an evil to him. When is life an evil? When it offers a man nothing but suffering and pain.

The liberal says the end of religion is to make man happy while he's alive. And the fundamentalist says the end of religion is to make man happy when he dies.

A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.

The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.

Publish not men's secret faults, for by disgracing them you make yourself of no repute.

The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce. You can't weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.

Credit leads a man into temptation. Cash down is the only thing that will deliver him from evil.

If anybody ever dares to compare Bob Dole to Clinton, then they're comparing a criminal to an honest man.

If one man tells you to murder, you get a jail cell - if another man tells you to murder, you get medals and a pension.

If something is wrong, it matters not if a thousand men are for it; you must still oppose it. If something is just, no amount of popular outcry should stay you from your course.

The man who holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare.

Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

To judge a man means nothing more than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?

A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.

You've got to stand for something, or you'll fall for anything You've got to be your own man, not a puppet on a string

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.

You can judge the moral bearing of a political system, a political institution, a political man by the degree of danger they attach to the fact of being observed through the eyes of a satiric poet.

What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.

Man must now assume the responsibility for his world. He can no longer shove it off on religious power.

Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory.

Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane.

There can be only one permanent revolution- a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.