Quotes About Ethics

I wondered when exactly I had exchanged my conscience for fearful obedience.

If you catch them in an early lie, they learn their lesson and so they don't continue to do it. But if you don't call them on early lies, they only get worse, bigger, and more dangerous.

It's clear to me that if we raise children with no moral compass, we are planting the seeds of our own destruction.

America comes with both rights and responsibilities. You have, for example, the right to free speech, but you have the responsibility to not yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. If you don't live up to that responsibility, you face certain consequences. It's a simple but effective formula. Unfortunately, tenured professors are completely insulated from it. They can scream fire in their classrooms all they want - and then hide behind their tenure if anyone questions them on it.

Anyone who speaks of punishing their political enemies in on the wrong side. It is clearly evil and we have a responsibility to say so.

If we want to be endowed with rights – real human rights, we have to act with responsibility. We must not be comfortable with rights. We must be comfortable with responsibility.

It must be frustrating for decent parents to watch their children fall under the influence of radical educators, and sometimes make foolish decisions based on the predominant cultures in their schools. But no one should be surprised it happens—far too many educators are moral relativists who reject the notion of absolute right or wrong.

It's okay for Christians throughout centuries to exterminate races and for their priests to rape little kids throughout decades, but trying to give the people the power to think and be individual, that's evil?

I don't have a 'side'—I'm responsible for what I say and nothing else.

As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing

mass surveillance is a universal temptation for any unscrupulous power.

Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda.

Bush violated FISA [...] because he wanted to violate the law in order to establish the general 'principle' that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law.

The Right to Privacy," arguing that robbing someone of their privacy was a crime of a deeply different nature than the theft of a material belonging.

in the face of severe injustice, a refusal to dissent is the sign of a character flaw or moral failure. Philosophy

The very idea that reporters should be free of opinions is far from some time-honored requirement of the profession; in fact, it is a relatively new concoction that has the effect, if not the intent, to neuter journalism. This

Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism.

In fact, both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices, and both courses of action reveal something important about the individuals involved. Contrary to the accepted premise-that radical dissent demonstrates a personality disorder-the opposite could be true in the face of sever injustice, a refusal to dissent is the sign of a character flaw or moral failure.

Equally nonsensical was the notion that Snowden would try to save himself by giving away surveillance secrets. He had dismantled his life and risked a future in prison to tell the world about a clandestine surveillance system he believed must be stopped.

I am reminded of the query made about man's inhumanity to man in the concentration camps. The question was asked: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God? And the answer came: Where was man? For it was men alone who did this evil. Not God or religion or men acting in the name of God or religion. But simply men.

People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding.

It was a good thing; and to admit that a good thing has derived from an evil thing is to bend the knee to evil to some extent.

no man is above the law and that includes the president of the United States

Always look at what people do, not who they are.