Quotes About Ethics

Such truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.

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

so bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can't join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for....

Remember this, I beseech you, all you boys who are getting into the upper forms. Now is the time in all your lives, probably, when you may have more wide influence for good or evil on the society you live in than you ever can have again.

You are no longer a boy, and one of the first duties which a man owes to his friends and to society is to live within his income.

This work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in England at any rate.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Health is the requisite after morality

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society

Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him

The merchant has no country.

Money and not morality is the principle of commerce and commercial nations.

Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

If God is just, I tremble for my country.

[On slavery:] We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.