Quotes About Ethics

When priests go bad, they go very bad indeed, and commit crimes that would make the average sinner pale.

Very often in my experience, the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of elementary justice or principle is at issue.

No creo en la inmortalidad del individuo, y considero que la ética es una preocupación exclusivamente humana que no está respaldada por ninguna autoridad sobrehumana.

temos arte e achamos que os sérios dilemas éticos são mais bem abordados por Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Schiller, Dostoievski e George Eliot do que pelas histórias morais míticas dos livros sagrados.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform.

if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.

Orwell's] very ordinariness is the sterling guarantee that we need no saintly representative consciences. We would do better to make sterner use of our own.

This is made additionally problematic by the tendency of modern medicine to fall back on the use of euphemistic

Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.

Estamos seguros de que se puede vivir una vida ética sin religión. Y de hecho sabemos que el reverso es cierto: que la religión ha ocasionado que innumerables personas no solo no se comporten mejor que otras, sino que se concedan licencias para comportarse de formas que dejarían estupefacto al regente de un burdel o a un genocida.

ground)—"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"—has entered our literature and our consciousness. This episode

And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.

it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It's not moral to lie to children. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.

The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.

serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

he was praised from the clouds for showing his sturdy willingness to murder an innocent in expiation of his own crimes.

One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions, or barred from committing them, but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.... If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

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. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven't had a reply yet.

We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.

the strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good.

Legalism at one extreme (keep all the rules) and license at the other (reject any rules) are both completely wrong answers to the question of how Christians should live.

An Israelite could not have sung the familiar song 'God is so good, God is so good, God is so good, he's so good to me' (though the words echo the Psalms) without being reminded also of its ethical consequence: 'God asks me to show that goodness to others.