Quotes About Ethics

I still believe that a person's hand shake meant something, a person was as good as their word, and swapping spit with a friend meant you could always trust them and you could always know they had your back no matter what. Those days are fading away, but I'll always believe.

To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.

It is impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others.

Never take anything you haven't earned; You always end up paying for it one way or another.

Hold, Sir, I say! None of your profanity before me. If I do evil to anyone on such occasions, it is because he will have it so; therefore, the evil is not of my doing.

None of us would admit to having "bad character," although we have all done bad things. In fact, a person who has never done anything "bad" will be a pretty superficial, infantile being, and that is a bad thing.

Every man has a right to kill himself.

One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.

Sin is obviously relative to the man, and not a universal attribute.

Be just before you are generous.

Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity.

If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.

What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his immortal soul?

Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.

Seamos justos antes que generosos

Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can't understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn't he have some spark of manhood about him?

Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned.

Tenía la costumbre de tratar los problemas morales como el carnicero a la carne, y en aquel caso había tomado la decisión

He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an adventureless tale.

We are a generous people but we must also be just. —I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

God and morality and religion come first.

That's the maxim of the law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned.

Tell me, for example, would you deflower a virgin?—Excuse me, Stephen said politely, is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?

I believe you're a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.