Quotes About Ethics

The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is what should be. Now, if you're taught to live up to a what should be that never existed -- only an occult superstition, no proof of this should be -- then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that!

President Bush and Bill Clinton both agree that cloning is morally wrong. Clinton said that he thinks humans should be made the old-fashioned way -- liquored up in a cheap hotel room.

According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take "a harder stance" on the death penalty. What's a harder stance on the death penalty? We're already killing the guy? How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair?

A 66-year-old deputy U. S. attorney general in South Carolina named Roland Corning lost his job after police discovered him at a cemetery with an 18-year-old stripper, a bag of sex toys, and a bottle of Viagra. To be fair, people do grieve differently.

We should make politicians dress like race car drivers -- when they get money, make them wear the company logos on their suit.

You know how you can tell if a gas station is price-gouging? If the sign says "Open".

A new poll shows that Americans now believe that Bill Clinton is more honest than President Bush.... At least when Clinton screwed the nation, he did it one person at a time.

Women will soon be able to make their own sperm using their own bone marrow. Is that unbelievable? How unfair is that for us guys, huh? I mean, all these years, we've been in charge of manufacturing and distribution, you know what I'm saying? We provide free delivery and installation.

In South Korea, a scientist considered to be one of the pioneers in the field of cloning has been sentenced to two years in prison. At least, they think it's him ...

Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very unprofitable.

Not for nothing was Smith's first book about moral philosophy. His concern, as Foley says, was the one that has haunted economic thinking ever since: "how to be a good person and live a good and moral life within the antagonistic, impersonal, and self-regarding social relations that capitalism imposes.

I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?

Someone has said that even the worst sinner spends more time doing things that are good and harmless than in doing things that are bad. In other words, there is some good even in the worst of us.

PROVERB: "A tavern can't corrupt a good man, and a synagogue can't reform a bad one.

It has been said that the basic principle of Jewish ethics lies in the idea of mandatory mitzvas. Said Eleazar ben Simeon: "The world is judged by the majority of its people [and] an individual by the majority of his deeds. Happy is he who performs a good deed: that may tip the scale for him and the world [italics mine]." Israel Zangwill called the mitzvas the Jews' "sacred sociology.

All of Judaism's philosophy, ethics, ethos, learning, education, and hierarchy of values are saturated with a sense of, and heightened sensitivity to, rakhmones. God is often called the God of Mercy and Compassion: Adonai El Rakhum Ve-Khanum. The writings of the prophets are permeated with appeals for rakhmones, a divine attribute. (So, too, are the words of Jesus and the books of the New Testament.)

The sages taught the Jews not to rejoice over another's misfortune. "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth" (Proverbs 24:17). (I must confess that I have always enjoyed gloating over the comeuppance suffered by the detestable, regardless of race, color, or creed.)

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction ... the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

"Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.

As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.