Quotes About Ethics

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Man's moral nature is a riddle which only eternity can solve.

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.

Some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.

If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

No man is fit to be a Senator...unless he is willing to surrender his political life for great principle.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

A business which exists to make one man or one family rich, and whose existence is of no moment when this is achieved, is not solidly founded.

Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.

A great man is one who can have power and not abuse it.

If man looks within himself he must perceive two things: a law of right, and that which it condemns.

Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations.

Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?

There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.

Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's life happens to be placed. It shows how much good men require of us.

No great question will ever be settled in dollars and cents. Great questions must be settled on moral grounds and the tests of what makes free men.

There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.

I will live and die by this testimony: that I loved a good conscience; that I never invaded another man's liberty; and that I preserved my own.