Quotes About Ethics

Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond. They

For the Revolutionary generation, silent virtue almost always would be valued more than loud eloquence.

One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Rollin's works were not just records of events, but also instruction manuals about how to live, and especially how to acquire virtue.

Behavior that Christians would never support in any other context suddenly becomes perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, simply because the state has declared that a war is under way. (That's what Voltaire meant when he said, "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.")

Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all living beings, we are all savages.

What man's mind can create, man's character can control.

By what right did we lure children to their deaths, caught by a glint of light on metal, a trumpery banner?

Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen.

In America, we no longer have an institutionalized, organized way of calling business to task - of taking them to account for what they've done - and this is especially true in the cultural realm.

Mark Lilla evokes the feeling well in a sympathetic 1998 summary of conservative thinking. It is not that anyone thinks that incivility, promiscuity, drug use, and irresponsibility are good things. But we have become embarrassed to criticize them unless we can couch our objections in the legalistic terms of rights, the therapeutic language of self-realization, or the economic jargon of efficiency.

They took all three leadership positions in the Kansas house and introduced what they called a "Contract with Kansas," a solemn pledge to send more convicts to the chair while defending the fetus.

He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it, is a saint; that boasts of it, is a devil.

Better break your word than do worse in keeping it.

Plain dealing is a jewel, but they that wear it are out of fashion

Gratitude is the least of the virtues, but ingratitude is the worst of vices.

'Tis better to suffer wrong than do it.

Good, but not religious-good.

But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience.

Do what you can to do what you ought, and leave hoping and fearing alone.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature that is to say, of his own life.

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.

No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.