Quotes About Ethics

It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.

All laws which can be broken without any injury to another, are counted but a laughing-stock, and are so far from bridling the desires and lusts of men, that on the contrary they stimulate them.

The proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live.

The same man cannot be both Friend and Flatterer.

Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

As the touchstone tries gold, so gold tries men.

If a physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.

If a thief helps a poor man out of the spoils of his thieving, we must not call that charity.

The more able a man is, if he make ill use of his abilities, the more dangerous will he be to the commonwealth.

Man's sense of Morality tends to decrease as his Power increases

We may avoid the laws of man, but there are greater laws that can't be broken.

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

When good men die their goodness does not perish, But lives though they are gone. As for the bad, All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.

One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!

When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.

The universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of latitude.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

He who speaks ill of an absent friend, or fails to take his part if attacked by another, that man is a scoundrel.

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.