Quotes About Ethics

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

T]he sacred sense of right and the reverence for the law, which it is difficult to destroy in the minds of the multitude, it is still more difficult to reproduce.

For a man of the type of Pompeius, who for want of faith in himself and in his star timidly clung in public life to formal right, and with whom the pretext was nearly of as much importance as the motive, this circumstance was of serious weight.

He was one of those men who are capable it may be of a crime, but not of insubordination; in a good as in a bad sense, he was thoroughly a soldier. Men of mark respect the law as a moral necessity, ordinary men as a traditional everyday rule; for this very reason military discipline, in which more than anywhere else law takes the form of habit, fetters every man not entirely self-reliant as with a magic spell.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.

But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.

Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen

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To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

A man who lies is ashamed, for each lie teaches him the degradation of a world which, forcing him to lie in order to live, promptly sings the praises of loyalty and truthfulness.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public.

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

The world has a lot to thank murderers for, when you come to think of it.

The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism – a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals – has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.

The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.

was Aristotle who said that a man who committed an offence while intoxicated was doubly guilty: first of the offence itself, and second of having intoxicated himself.

When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as 'nonjudgmental.' For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.

That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

But life is not a matter of double-entry book-keeping. No number of years in prison can be equivalent to the torture and killing of children: if it were, the term could be served in advance and the person who served it would be entitled to commit his crimes on his release.