Quotes About Ethics

If you follow someone who's universally viewed as having impeccable character and strong integrity, then you're likely to be viewed the same. If you willingly follow someone who's considered dishonest and unethical, your own image is tarnished.

What you preach and what you celebrate must be one and the same. If they aren't, the event will come off as insincere and phony—and your credibility will suffer.

a Quaker abolitionist with "a reasonable leaning toward wrath in cases of emergency

He warned that those "who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.

You know you're a Puritan when you feel that even the Bible needs to be cleaned up.

Be happy to, I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed precis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective.

This was not a just war after all—it was just a war: yet another exercise in consecrated barbarity and sanctified slaughter.

Death, like virtue, has its degrees.

To steal book seems like stealing the soul out of someone.

Boy, you just can't kill people like you used to

Let's just say that if these scientist had been using their brilliance for good instead of evil, cars would run off water vapor and leave fresh compost behind them; no one would be hungry; no one would be ill; all buildings would be earthquake-, bomb-, and flood-proof; and the world's entire economy would have collapsed and been replaced by one based on the value of chocolate.

I stared at her in amazement. How do you even live with yourself?...You're willing to sell children to a foreign government so they can be used as weapons, possibly against other Americans. I don't get it. Were you hiding behind a door on morals and ethics day?...You couldn't mother someone if they shot five gallons of estrogen into your veins.

Honesty is always good, except when it's better to lie.

Is it important to be right or is it important to do what's right? That's one of the hardest lessons to learn.

Sometimes being a leader isn't about winning. Sometimes it's about doing what's right, instead of what's powerful.

There's nothing more dangerous than than someone trying to act for the greater good.

So you have your price. Your soul for a cookie.

stand for something or fall for nothing, if you are neutral you'll be pushed anywhere.

Your integrity, your dignity, your honor - they aren't for sale. Not ever. Not to anyone.

why does doing the right thing feel so bad?

In movies, people always "borrow" cars by yanking some wires out from under the dash and connecting them. But the real way it works involves a screwdriver and the starter thingy, under the hood. My personal ethics prevent me from giving you more information. That'd be just what I need: a rash of car thefts across America, committed by dedicated readers.

Boy, you just can't kill people like you used to," said Fang.

To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society." - Theodore Roosevelt.