Quotes About Ethics

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

Where there's property, there's theft.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.

People cheat when they are afraid. When there is no cost to being wrong or confessing ignorance, there is no reason to cheat or fake comprehension.

the object was not to stay alive but to stay human.

When I think of ethics, I think of leaving things better than you found them. And to me, that goes from everything from environmentally, to how you work with suppliers with labor questions, to the carbon footprint of your products, to the things you choose to support, to the way you treat your employees. . . . Your whole persona fits under that umbrella.

a person should not have to choose between doing good and doing well

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.

I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.

Nowadays you don't go around on the street kicking people, punching people -- because if you do (makes gun shape with hand), well that's it -- I don't care how good you are.

I don't want to put the world to rights... I just don't like people who put the world to wrongs.

People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.

Professional accountability is a good thing. Without it, excellence is merely a pipe dream and even average performance isn't a realistic expectation.

Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.

There are two kinds of second class men in business. There is the man who puts money first and service second. There is the man who puts service first and money second, who never has any money. The first class man in business is the man who is made up out of rolling the other two kinds into one man and working them together.

A vice is a failure of desire.

The stinking rich are fucking cheap," Green said. "Which is how they stay rich and why they stink.

His father taught him that standing up for what you believe in comes with a price but that backing down exacts a toll that your soul never stops paying.

Yeah," Snell said, waving a Ferrari past the truck but looking at Eve as he did it, "the same people you're giving blow jobs to every day to get your TV show. The only difference between you and Detective Garvey is that he earned his badge and doesn't have to betray other cops to get ahead.

do it because the victim deserves a cop who will work the case instead of one who is more intent on figuring out how some poor bastard who got shot four times in the back, and got dumped on the jurisdictional line, can be written off as a suicide.

Most of the time, it's not whether or not you have a gun in your hand that matters," his father said. "It's what you stand for and how strong you stand for it.