Quotes About Ethics

If Al Capone, Two Gun Crowley, Dutch Schultz, and the desperate men and women behind prison walls don't blame themselves for anything - what about the people with whom you and I come in contact?

We have all read the golden rule and the Sermon on the Mount. Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.

The so-called "right to privacy" of which so much is made in contemporary life is in very large measure merely a way of avoiding scrutiny in our wrongdoing.

And with respect to feelings that are inherently injurious and wrong, their strategy is not one of resisting them in the moment of choice but of living in such a way that they do not have such feelings at all, or at least do not have them in a degree that makes it hard to decide against them when appropriate.

The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do and who to be.

The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.

Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the "second mile," turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just as everyone around us does.

The spiritual side of the human being, Christian and non-Christian alike, develops into the reality that it becomes, for good or ill.

We humans, though, on our own—manipulating the natural powers around us, whether of the atom or of social processes—are truly a terrifying phenomenon. We easily appear to be completely out of control today, careening madly toward the edge of the cosmic cliff. Candid observers quickly come to the conclusion that there is some pervasive and basic lack in human life.

This not-knowing is a game of irresponsibility. It is a way of saying I'm not responsible. I'm an agnostic.

In charting one's course in life, it is important never to forget that many things that cannot be called wrong or evil are nevertheless not good for us.

if you sufficiently dismember yourself, you will not be able to do any wrong action. This is the logic by which Jesus reduces the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees to the absurd.

In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not "Did I do the specific things in Jesus' illustrations?" but "Am I being the kind of person Jesus' illustrations are illustrations of?

men of the modern world exist in a continual and flagrant antagonism between their consciences and their way of life."1 There

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, "hell to pay." That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.

Consider a daily newspaper or television newscast and eliminate from it every report that presupposes a breaking of one of the Ten Commandments. Very little will be left.

Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward.

One has to feel strong revulsion toward the wrong feeling one now has or is likely to have and at the same time strong attraction to good feeling that one does not now feel.

under their influence, and that of a few less significant developments in psychology, the human being has been increasingly taken to be the kind of thing that could not be a subject of moral knowledge. That is because, in such views, the human self (if it even exists, which has been strongly denied) is governed by unconscious forces other than self-awareness and rational self-direction.

good unless others are responsible.

Can anyone now seriously believe that if people are only permitted or enabled to do what they want, they will then be happy or more disposed to do what is right?

What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities? Your rights will do you little good unless others are responsible

We cannot behave "on the spot" as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does.

Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not. What