Quotes About Ethics

Patriotism has served, at different times, as widely different ends as a razor, which ought to be used in keeping your face clean and yet may be used to cut your own throat or that of an innocent person.

When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.

because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.

NOT "What's good for General Motors is good for the country.

There is not a thread in it but scorns self-indulgence, weakness and rapacity.

I'm not a politician and my other habits air good.

Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford

If good and evil are continuous, any crime can be linked with any virtue. Imposture merges away into self-deception so that only relatively has there ever been impostor.

That sort of calculus is easy enough if the potential good is to unidentified people. It's easy to dismiss a faceless abstraction. It's much harder to look a real person in the eye and say: 'For my belief in the inviolability of the eight-cell embryo you must die.' That's often what the 'saviour sibling' cases boil down to.

If doctors as a whole aren't bound by a duty of confidentiality, patients generally will be less forthcoming, and the general confidence that the public reposes in the medical profession will be reduced.

There is an infinite amount of suffering in the world. There is a distinctly finite amount of resources to deal with it. How do we decide who gets what? The dilemmas are agonizing. One man's treatment is another man's denial of treatment. To save X is to condemn Y.

It doesn't take much legal sleight of hand to transform an act into an omission and vice versa. If I starve a child to death by refusing to feed it, I should expect a frosty reception to my submission at my murder trial that I was only omitting to do something. And there are various thought experiments devised by philosophers that seek to indicate that there is no distinction of substance between acts and omissions.

First, they contend that compassion makes euthanasia morally mandatory. We wouldn't let our dog continue to scream for years with uncontrolled pain: we'd take it to the vet to be put down. Why should we deny to humans what basic decency makes us do to our dogs? And second, they emphasize autonomy. Our lives are our own, they say. We can decide what to do with them. If we choose to end them, that's our business.

Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.

Do what is right according to your beliefs no matter what the cost.

The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage, without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.

The bottom line of my business philosophy can best be summed up as follows: Good profit can only result from creating value for the customer. It is the manifestation of the entrepreneur's respect for what the customer values.

4. Principled Entrepreneurship: This principle—so central to our culture that we had it trademarked—is defined as "maximizing the long-term profitability of the business by creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity." Creating value for society requires Principled Entrepreneurship—not political or other forms of entrepreneurship, such as corporate welfare or fraud.

Only a cad as low as a thief Would write in a book or turn down a leaf, Since 'tis thievery, as well is known, To make free with that which is not our own.

Selling drug secrets violates a trust that is fundamental to the integrity of both scientific research and our financial markets.

Many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if it's done by nice people like ourselves.

Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to.

Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.