Quotes About Ethics

We couldn't do as much harm if people could feel what they were doing.

What a man eats, he should be willing to kill.

nobody does anything wrong until the moment they do.

It's not only possible, it pretty much describes every human being on the planet. Everybody is a good person and a bad person at the same time. The only real variation is in the balance. How much good to how much bad. When a person has a bigger good side, we call him a good person. But it's never absolute.

Self-interest usually brings injustice with it.

The use of torture is contrary to sound judgment and common sense. Humanity itself cries out against it, and demands it to be utterly abolished.

It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.

Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.

Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.

Morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation.

So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.

It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?

We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as Do Not Take Things That Aren't Yours Unless No One Is Looking and Good Things Happen to Good People and A Year Is 365 Days are agreed upon, even when they aren't true, perhaps especially so.

You can't stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they'll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they'll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason.

it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you'll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

Seems like someone should have thought of a rule that goes Do not Fuck Your Only Planet to Death Under Any Circumstances . Seems like that should have been Rule Number One.

The oligarchs do not care what justice is, only what seems just. They do not care what mercy is, only what appears merciful. Thus justice and mercy will always escape them.

War must always be done out of sight, or it shocks people and they stop immediately.

what maiden knows how the world is skewed to spare any testing of her virtue?

I've been thinking a lot about rules lately. About karma, I guess, even though most people just viciously abuse that word. They don't give one spangly fuck about the wheel of becoming and unbecoming.

He'll never be good if he can't choose to be nasty. It's the choice that makes the good.

You can't stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they'll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they'll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason—the bastards.