Quotes About Ethics

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.

The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on 'our side'. Is it?

And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Rights have to be asserted. Animals cannot make such assertions. We have to make representations to ourselves on their behalf.

Those who worry about the treatment of animals are often accused of sentimentality or of putting the plight of beasts before the immense problems of humanity. But it is quite rare to find a humanitarian who is indifferent to animals and surprisingly common to find that those who belittle animal rights are the same ones who find the pain of humans easy to bear.

My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever.

Ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men

But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap.

because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—

One feels almost laughably heavy-footed in pointing out that Mrs. Clinton's prim little book, It Takes a Village, proposes sexual abstinence for the young, and that the president was earnestly seconding this very proposal while using an impressionable intern as the physical rather than moral equivalent of a blow-up doll.

Christian America" that cares for people before they are born and after they are dead but is only interested in clerical coercion for the years in between

But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap. It is also a form of discipline.

And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought.

Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.

A high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

The argument about ethics and morality will have to go on in a post-religious society, just as it had to go on when religion was regnant and was often ordering good people to agree to evil things such as torture, slavery, or cruelty to children.

Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my country when I remember that god is just.

When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator.

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

obrar siempre de manera que podamos convertir la máxima de nuestra conducta en ley universal».

Christopher Hitchens

Es que quiere evitar el mal y es incapaz de hacerlo? Entonces, es que es impotente. ¿Es que puede, pero no quiere? Entonces es malévolo. ¿Es que quiere y puede? Entonces, ¿de dónde proviene el mal?6

Corruptio optimi pessima: no greater cruelty will be devised than by those who are sure, or are assured, that they are doing good.

Cuanto peor es el infractor, más devoto resulta ser.