Quotes About Ethics

JACK Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNON My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.

Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.

beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

Men become old, but they never become good.

But strange that I was not told That the brain can hold In a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

There is no such thing as good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from a scientific point of view.

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. 

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.

I never change. MRS. CHEVELEY: (elevating her eyebrows) Then life has taught you nothing? LADY CHILTERN: It has taught me that a person who has once been guilty of a dishonest and dishonorable action may be guilty of it a second time, and should be shunned. MRS. CHEVELEY: Whould that rule apply to everyone? LADY CHILTERN: Yes, to everyone, without exception. MRS. CHEVELEY: Then I am sorry for you, Gertrude, very sorry for you.

I don't think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad, as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women. as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentence, pity, sacrifice.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.  Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.  Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. 

When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.