Quotes About Ethics

To avert disaster, we have not only to teach men to make things but to teach them to have complete moral control over what they make.

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man. [Lat., In totum jurare, nisi ubi necesse est, gravi viro parum convenit.]

Man has an innate capacity for violence, but can only justify it in the name of justice.

Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

As we become civilized we are governed less by persons and more by principles. . . . The best of all leaders is the man who teaches people to lead themselves.

No one can be wrong with man and right with God.

There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion.

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience, but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

A rich man without charity is a rogue; and perhaps it would be no difficult matter to prove that he is also a fool.

Men are guided less by conscience than by glory; and yet the shortest way to glory is to be guided by conscience.

If you know how a man deals with his money, how he gets it, spends it, keeps it, shares it, you know one of the most important things about him.

A man who does not know how to be angry, does not know how to be good. Now and then a man should be shaken to the core with indignation over things evil.

Ambassadors are honest men sent abroad to lie for their countries.

Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.

Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

It is a hard thing for a man to be righteous, if the unrighteous man is to have the greater right.

It's okay for a man to commit adultery if his wife is ugly.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! The British journalist. But seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to!

A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.

A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.

I've never hanged a man. It is the law that has done it.

No matter how brilliant a man may be, he will never engender confidence in his subordinates and associates if he lacks simple honesty and moral courage.

Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.