Quotes About Ethics

A million dollars sounds like a lot, I know. Especially when you're young. But you can't let money erode your principles or you'll wind up with nothing.

the next time you're faced with a choice, do the right thing. It hurts everyone less in the long run.

What I stand for is what I stand on.

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.

If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don't know and have compassion for them at the same time?

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality.

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that to work is to pray. (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

The crisis of community has its source in the corruption of character.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence - that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I've tried to keep before myself. What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.

People do not become wealthy by treating one another or the world kindly and with respect.

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

Of two evils choose neither.

It is conceded that nothing contrary to reason can be true. But it is no less important to remember that nothing contrary to our moral nature can be true.

When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.

Today's social media have a massive and almost instantaneous ability to bring the pressure to conform on any selected target. If an end is seen as "good," justifying the means to achieve it is simply a matter of marketing. And this invites a subtle, chronic kind of lying—the editing and massaging of information—to get the results claimed to be needed. This

the disgust of friends and family, the loss of reputation—the only loss ever, the one robbery. Who steals my purse steals trash.… But he that filches from me my good name—And who was doing that for him, who but himself?

All political power is a trust.

Action, not principle is the object of law and legislation; with a person's principles no government has any right to interfere.

right from the start most German generals knew that Hitler was psychotic. But as long as he was winning the war, almost all of them were happy to overlook that detail