Quotes About Ethics

Tis time to die, when 'tis a shame to live.

Sex and religion are closer to each other that either might prefer.

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.

The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.

Characer is much easier kept than recovered.

Political Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of every [human], has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other [human] the free exercise of the same rights.

Reputation is what men and women think of us. Character is what God and the angels know of us.

It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.

A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.

Better fare hard with good men than feast it with bad.

What is it the Bible teaches us? — repine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? — to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.

But the christian story of God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it, (for that is the plain language of the story,) cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better, is making the story still worse; as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder; and to tell him that all this is a mystery, is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it .

Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.

why do men continue to practice in themselves, the absurdities they despise in others? Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke's attack on the French Revolution (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1791), p. 41.

Kill the king but spare the man.

It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost.