Quotes About Ethics

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.   When

The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way.

three simple questions beside those theories: How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career? My relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness? I live a life of integrity—and stay out of jail?

If you give in to "just this once," based on a marginal-cost analysis, you'll regret where you end up. That's the lesson I learned: it's easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip. —Will Rogers

Ethics are more important than laws. —Wynton Marsalis, artistic director, Jazz at Lincoln Center

With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.

Sport, they called it, but that had been nothing more than a softer name for the bloodlust that man had carried

They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say - what's blood for, if not for shedding?

Who in their right minds would trust someone who made a profession out of poking around in sick people?

Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.

Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don't you think?

You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.

for a democracy to flourish, it must have an incorruptible bureaucracy.

I do not believe that any form of lasting community can exist where people do not share the same sense of what is just and what is not just.

Bookselling is like prostitution, you sell your wares, you close your eyes, and you never fall in love with the clients. You also keep your fingers crossed that they won't ask for anything perverted.

What if the 'brutal thunderclap of halt' takes the form of the choice, Dishonesty or insanity?

When a holy was is declared, the end justifies any means to those crusaders.

because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day.

Elwood said, It's against the law. State law, but also Elwood's. If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That's how he saw it, how he'd always seen things.

Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn't be in chains.

I don't get where it says, He that stealeth a man and sells him, shall be put to death," Cora said. "But then later it says, Slaves should be submissive to their masters in everything—and be well-pleasing." Either it was a sin to keep another as property, or it had God's own blessing. But to be well-pleasing in addition? A slaver must have snuck into the printing office and put that in there.

Perhaps if he'd spent more time in the crucible of the county jail, Elwood would have known that it is best not to interfere in other people's violence, no matter the underlying facts of the incident.