Quotes About Ethics

their installations. Once a wiretap was approved, Hoover considered it approved forever. Hoover had asserted that the FBI was free to install bugs at will, without informing a higher authority. He told Katzenbach that this power had been granted him in perpetuity by Franklin Delano Roosevelt a quarter of a century ago.

The CIA falsely claimed credit for the arrest and wrested back control of the interrogation. Its officers blasted the prisoner with noise, froze him with cold, and buried him in a mock coffin. Soufan and Gaudin protested. The CIA officers told them the techniques had been approved at the highest levels of the American government. Soufan

Army officers demanded "a piece of al-Qahtani" and "told the FBI to step aside" in October. They questioned him for twenty-hour stretches, leashed him and made him perform dog tricks, stripped him naked and paraded him, froze him to the point of hypothermia, wrapped him from the neck up in duct tape, confronted him with snarling dogs, and ordered him to pray to an idol shrine. By

It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.

It is shocking how little it has been necessary to defend the sheer reach of the attention merchant into the entirety of our lived experience. Formerly the state of technology imposed its own limits, but at a time when these limits have been effectively eliminated, it is for us to ask some fundamental questions: Do we draw any lines between the private and the commercial? If so, what times and spaces should we consider as too valuable, personal, or sacrosanct for the usual onslaught?

From the beginning, Microsoft had proven the mantra that good artists copy but great artists steal. Its first operating system (MS-DOS) was actually a clone of CP/M, another operating system.* Microsoft Windows was a rip-off of the Apple Macintosh operating system; Microsoft Word and Excel were copies of Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3, respectively.

A good character may not make us happy, but it does make us worthy of happiness (XXV 1174). He also maintains that people of character have an inner worth, while people of talent have a market value (XXV 1174), and emphasizes that this worth is created by the person himself. Most importantly, however, he claims that character 'consists in the basic characteristic [GrundAnlage] of the will' (XXV 1174).

Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.

Religious belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived.

photography was "a circus kind of business, and unfit for a gentleman to engage in.

Suicide is not a crime in Indiana," said Holmes dismissively. "Therefore, to be an accessory before or after the fact would be no crime in Indiana.

Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known, and even encouraged

Steve offered to pay his victim a month's salary if she would write a statement saying he had not attacked her. She refused. But because she was engaged and worried about what her fiancé would think if she had to go through a trial with a man who would try to destroy her, she backed off. The case disappeared.

He told her he "controlled every court in Indiana." For $30, he could get someone to sign an affidavit to anything he dictated, he boasted. For $50, he could get a man killed.

To avoid trouble, one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment

Bank accounts were not backed by anything but the good name of the people who ran the bank. And too many of them saw the personal savings of High Plains nesters as just another source of cash for the stock market or an ill-conceived business loan. No matter the exact cause: the First National was broke.

the American Breeders Association, had nothing to do with horses; its eugenics committee was headed by a man who'd been president of Indiana University, and the first president of Stanford, David S. Jordan. He taught that the human race could be improved only by preventing the disabled or certain nonwhites from reproducing

There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune," Roosevelt said just before he became president.

A decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.

Don't do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You'll always know.

Must-watch documentary The Gatekeepers (2012)

you should never publicly criticize anyone or anything unless it is a matter of morals or ethics. Anything negative you say could at the very least ruin someone's day, or worse, break someone's heart, or simply change someone from being a future ally of yours to someone who will never forget

Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn't require being unethical

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have."—John Rawls