Quotes About Ethics

have seen billionaires, including convicted criminals, extract admissions of guilt from British newspapers too poor or too frightened to fight, and use them to convince journalists and politicians around the world that legitimate criticisms of their actions were groundless.

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

Clockers asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading Clockers by Richard Price)

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.

You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie. 'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.' 'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.' 'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife.

If the price you have to pay for a sin is so high that you end up wanting to kill yourself and committing suicide is an even worse sin, then Someone's done his sums wrong. Someone's overcharging.

So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.

Can I be a good person and spend that much money on overpriced consumer goods? I don't know. But I do know this: I'd be no good without them.

not even sex, especially not sex, please God not sex, the filthiest and most terrifying invention of the early seventies.

It's not reading and whatever that makes you good or bad. It's whether you rape people, or get addicted to crack and go out mugging.

Most decent people can't sleep easily at night, and that, apparently, is precisely why the world is in such a mess.

Because some people believe that eating meat is wrong. And other people believe it's bad for you. And some people believe both." "What do we believe?" "I guess we believe both, but we don't care enough to do anything about it.

Being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way

If your hands were not clean, your good actions had grimmer and more relentless consequences than your sins.

If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.

Knowledge is more virtue than power.

He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.

When you think you're on the good side, you're capable of unthinkable evil.

Se for necessário fazer mal a um homem, então que seja de tal forma grave, que não haja razão para temer a sua vingança.

I thought you were a white knights who put great store in chivalry. It's not the least chivalrous of you to try to seduce me.

The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.

Everything good in life is either immoral, illegal or fattening.