Quotes About Ethics

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one? (Three Penny Opera)

It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.

Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.

I am not alone is doubting the imperative to respect cultures, as opposed to persons; and I believe we can respect persons only inasmuch as we consider them as abstract rights-holders.

wondering if Allah really got personally involved in the butchering of children to secure a heroin production factory. When the day came, who would God be more angry with: men like him who acted with no regard to His will, or men like these who used Him to justify their own brutality and ambition?

I'm hardly a stranger to the concept of bending rules to achieve a greater good.

What's a woman supposed to do when her angel starts using her devil's tools?

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, the the best way would be to start his own religion.

good can never catch up with evil, because with the gap between good and evil there is no hope whatsoever.

Who says that taking the supposed high road is the best path?

It was the first time I had suspected that the government would ever do such a thing. Believe me, reader, it shook me. I had always been brought up carefully to believe that, in government, truth, decency and honor were inseparable.

Psychiatrists use tortures you have never even heard of! They drug their patients and send huge jolts of electricity through their brains to destroy nerve responses! And that isn't all! At a whim, they take a steel probe, push it under the eyelids and scramble the prefrontal lobes! They have no intention of curing anyone. They are simply making it impossible for the victim to get well. Ever! AND THEY KNOW IT!

there are biddies, always biddies, everywhere in this world, who are more concerned with the morals of others than they are with their own. A

While there are some who extol your virtues, Miss Faber, there are others who wonder why you are not yet hanged." "I have determined that hanging would not suit my constitution, Sir, so I have tried to avoid it." A

Opt for a few at your side, but ensure your honor and respect of all.

I never cheat. I practice Gamesmanship - the art of winning games without actually cheating.

It's not wrong to hustle hustlers. It's like killing murderers, a public service. -Damon Salvatore

Jenny looked up quickly. "Do you believe in good and evil?" "Oh, yes. Very strongly. And I believe that evil sometimes has to be fought—personally. Hand to hand. If you care enough to do it.

There is no good and evil, only black and white. But either black or white on its own is boring, Jenny. If you mix them you get so many colors— so many colors...

What kind of world is it that lets a thing like that happen? That lets a girl like Sue get murdered for kicks, or kids in Afghanistan starve, or baby seals get skinned alive? -Matt Honeycutt

The world is filled with humans, and as soon as one dies, another appears. What does it matter if I relieve one wretched soul of its misery?

For a moment Eustace contemplated an existence spent in pleasing himself. How would he set about it? He had been told by precept, and had learned from experience, that the things he did to please himself usually ended in making other people grieved and angry, and were therefore wrong. Was he to spend his life in continuous wrong-doing, and in making other people cross? There would be no pleasure in that. Indeed what pleasure was there, except in living up to people's good opinion of him?

It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.