Quotes About Ethics

We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

You see, among men who are honored with the common appellation ogentleman, many contradictions to that character.

It is the duty of a great person so to demean himself, as that whatever endowments he may have, he may appear to value himself upon no qualities but such as any man may arrive at.

Just because a man is a homicidal maniac doesn't make him wrong.

Is it possible that the environmental severity of the 1930s induced-particularly in the most aware, alert, and compassionate of [British] men-a morality which makes no sense today?

But if there be an hereafter,And that there is, conscience, uninfluenc'dAnd suffer'd to speak out, tells every man,Then must it be an awful thing to die;More horrid yet to die by one's own hand.

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone's feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.

Men are not angels, neither are they brutes.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so; life's business being just the terrible choice.

It is every man's right to choose when to Sheathe the Sword." --- Ingtar Shinowa ---

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

To strip a man of all loyalties but those to the state, makes him not only a worm but a monster, without a shred of humanity.

There's just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hidy to 'em. Even then, they ain't worth the bullet it takes to shoot 'em.

The number of those men who know how to use wholly irresponsible power humanely and generously is small. Everybody knows this, and the slave knows it best of all.

I don't think that (U.S. President) George Bush...is a man of honor.

Where man is the end, or the means, all men are mean.

A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.

One man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.

A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.

Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause - nor any charter of immunities and rights.