Quotes About Ethics

man was not made to be guilty, sin is not interesting, the only ethics are those which lead man toward the greater things he carries in himself.

Three simple words - freedom, justice and honesty. These sum up what the Liberal Democrats stand for.

There are two freedoms — the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.

Do as you would be done by.

Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.

The trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything. In this century, 'anything' has included Hitler, Stalin and Mao, authors of the great genocidal madnesses of our time.

IN DEFENSE OF THE F-WORD I am sure there is a special place in heaven reserved for those who have never used the F-word. I will never get near that place.

The essence of foreign policy, is deciding which son of a bitch to support -in 1941, Hitler or Stalin; in 1972, Brezhnev or Mao; in 1979, Somoza or Ortega. One has to choose. A blanket anti-son of a bitch policy, like a blanket anti-ethnic cleansing policy, is soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

For the purposes of a pluralist society, the Bible is not about fact. It is about values. If we were a bit more tolerant about allowing the teaching of biblical values as ethics, we'd find far less pressure for the teaching of biblical fables as science.

In modern times we suffer not for our sins - sin having been abolished - but for ideology.

By what logical principle should the relief of death be granted only the terminally ill? Such a restriction is itself perverse. After all, the terminally ill face only a brief period of suffering. The chronically ill, or the healthy but bereft—they face a lifetime of agony. Why deny them the relief of a humane exit?

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.

polygamists. But I'm not the one who put them

Or as Chesterton put it, "The trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything." In this century, "anything" has included Hitler, Stalin and Mao, authors of the great genocidal madnesses of our time.

When you join the most monstrous of killing organizations, when you carry its seal, you become responsible for its crimes.

A number of moralists condemn lotteries and refuse to see anything noble in the passion of the ordinary gambler. They judge gambling as some atheists judge religion, by its excesses.

I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.

Cobb brought as his guest Tigers third baseman George Moriarity, who during the 1935 World Series as an umpire would distinguish himself by stalking over to the Chicago Cubs dugout and threatening to eject the entire team after some players had made anti-Semitic remarks to Tigers star Hank Greenberg.) The next day Cobb broke his rule about

Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby—who had a much worse reputation than Cobb for being an SOB—once wrote a magazine article called "You've Got to Cheat to Win" in which he contended that cheating occurred in each of 2,259 major league games in which he participated, starting in 1915. (He wasn't even talking about the use of spitballs, which were legal until 1920.) Diving into a pitched ball was perhaps the most common illicit practice;

The president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot, thought that ball-carriers in football ought not search for holes in the line that could lead to gaudy breakaway runs, but should do the modest, gentlemanly thing and plow headfirst into the nearest man-pile. (Eliot also didn't like baseball because he believed curveballs and other deceptive pitches to be unsportsmanlike.)

Le crime fait la honte, et non pas l'échafaud." (Shame comes from the crime, not the scaffold.)