Quotes About Ethics

Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different.

Let's face up to the question of who we support; let's defend the bastards and reform them later. 

It was a war of evil against lesser evil.

The best way to rob a bank is to own one.

extravagant generosity with other people's money.

those who live by the tort, die by the tort.

Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.

It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.

But above all he must refrain from seizing the property of others, because a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony.

A man who wishes to profess at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good.

For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.

The nature of man is such that people consider themselves put under an obligation as much by the benefits they confer as by those they receive.

the manner in which we live, and that in which we ought to live, are things so wide asunder, that he who quits the one to betake himself to the other is more likely to destroy than to save himself; since any one who would act up to a perfect standard of goodness in everything, must be ruined among so many who are not good.

Though fraud in all other actions be odious, yet in matters of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes his enemies by stratagem is as much to be praised as he who overcomes them by force.

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.

Verträge bricht man um des Nutzens willen.

For the friendships which we buy with a price, and do not gain by greatness and nobility of character, though they be fairly earned are not made good, but fail us when we have occasion to use them.

Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation

The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.

I say that every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency.

The wise prince, therefore, has always avoided these arms and turned to his own and has been willing rather to lose with them than to conquer with the others, not deeming that a real victory which is gained with the arms of others.