Quotes About Ethics

There is no such thing as "righteous" anger or justifiable killing.

Overcome the angry by non-anger; overcome the wicked by goodness; overcome the miser by generosity; overcome the liar by truth.

All anger feels like righteous anger; sorrow does not care whether it is righteous or not.

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

A woman finds it much easier to do ill than well. [Lat., Mulieri nimio male facere melius est onus, quam bene.]

Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons.

A temperate anger has virtue in it.

Real integrity means an answer. It doesn't just mean - it doesn't mean riding the anger. And this is very difficult to do.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it?

The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well--to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how--and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone.

There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.

Il ne nous suffit pas de comprendre nos obligations à l'égard des autres et de la terre; nous devons aussi les ressentir.

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not 'significant' to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only few years, after all) to 'need.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a 'practical' point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease.

Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship.

As the skills of production decline, the skills of responsibility perish.

In the coal counties, east and west, they were strip-mining without respect for the past or mercy to the future, and the reign of a compunctionless national economy was established everywhere.

we think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thousands of public dollars on "education" —and not a dime or a thought on character.