Quotes About Ethics

There is an ethics of perception. Theories are not simply forms of perception. When practised they become ethical decisions.

No one likes lawyers until you need one, at which point they assume the raiment of knights.

The corporal was not having sex with the congressman in a minefield.

We no longer whip people through the streets. Instead we send them to executive-level open jails for a few months' R&R before they hire PR teams to restore their reputations. Fraud, perjury, perverting the course of justice count as nothing

Yes, he wanted to do the right thing, but perhaps this time the right thing was something different.

This might have something to do with the fact that every half-decent flat in the area has been snapped up by war criminals shovelling their loose change into safe havens.

I know how the world works. Business decisions are not made for the good of the people, but for the sake of profit, loyalty and expedience.

Remembering was pointless; but forgetting somehow seemed immoral.

We're the police, we don't thump people.

I wouldn't like to find out my GP was messing about with black magic. It would be like discovering that your bank manager was also a stand-up comic.

There is a special place in hell for people who bring children into this world solely for the sake of seeming better than they are.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. How dare you intervene? As well ask, How dare you not?

I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.

My hope is that literature can replace religion as the source of our ethics, without ceasing to be a pleasurable study and pursuit in its own right

The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.

T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)

Divine permission, given to people who think they have god on their side, enables actions that a morally normal unbeliever would not contemplate.

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.