Quotes About Ethics

What shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years, and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some other method of inducing men to behave themselves.

They had the same saying as Americans: "Les affaires sont les affaires"—business is business. When you said that, you set moral considerations aside as irrelevant; the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God were idle dreams; liberty, equality, and fraternity were bait to catch votes; the only question was, did you have the price?

In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time.

Having bought so many politicians in his day, the Baron could hardly be blamed for taking a cynical attitude to the breed; now, since they were refusing to stay bought, he could hardly be blamed if he had decided to get rid of them.

Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting—intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen. Talent alone is not enough. Character and ethics, a point of view about the world in which you live and an education, can and must be acquired and developed.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

You would say that he felt that money had made him holy.

Wouldn't it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn't that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?

In all this world, I pray thee, who Is virtuous, heroic, true?

Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.

Stacy hated people who abused digital systems. It affronted her that they had fatally undermined the fundamental beauty and purity of the internet. They'd corrupted the most revolutionary invention of the twentieth century and turned it into an engine for triviality, for vitriol, for scamming...

One of the hardest things we have to do is learn to take responsibility for our own actions. Trying to sidestep actions that deep down we know are shameful is a powerful instinct. From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

Which translated, Stacey thought cynically, to 'If you're going to break the law – what I don't know can't hurt me.

But his desire to do the right thing

I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?

I don't want to be told that it's the people with power over us who are guilty, that we're innocent slaves, that we're not guilty because we're not free. I am free! I'm building a Vernichtungslager; I have to answer to the people who'll be gassed here. I can say No. There's nothing can stop me—as long as I can find the strength to face my destruction.

There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their deaths without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death.

The morality of the people—this is the measure of free, useful, creative labour.

You can't walk straight on a crooked line. You try you'll break your leg. How can you walk straight in a crooked system?

People are not resources that you consume.

When you're in war, you don't have to be perfect to be good, you just have to be 51% better than the enemy if you want a moral edge. We in the West have this Utopian idea that we have to be 99.9% good, and if we're not, then we're no damned good. And the enemy knows that.

W naszych rozwa?aniach wyszli?my od podstawowego fenomenologicznego faktu, a mianowicie tego, i? cz?owiek jest bytem ?wiadomym i odpowiedzialnym, a jego ukoronowaniem jest synteza obu tych cech, to jest ?wiadomo?? w?asnej odpowiedzialno?ci.