Quotes About Ethics

Communists and capitalists alike, liberal and conservative capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, I am doing this because I can't do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable. The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.

the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

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.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us.

We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, profit-for-profit's-sake economy, and yet remain a decent and a democratic nation, as we still apparently wish to think ourselves. This simply means that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence and are reduced merely to talk.

What is called the morality of a society is no more than a consequence of the morality of individuals. There is, by the same token, no such thing as a purely private morality, for the morals of private citizens are public in effect, and are increasingly so.

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.

Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay.

trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

They would not have been easy in their minds if there was something they could have got away with if they had not got away with it.

As Sir Albert Howard, a British agrarian much admired by Berry, once put it in The Soil and Health: "The using up of fertility is a transfer of past capital and of future possibilities to enrich a dishonest present: it is banditry pure and simple.

Commercial transactions embarrassed Tol. When he had to receive payment from somebody, the feeling would always come over him that it was too much; when he had to give payment, the same feeling would suggest that it was too little. The passage of money seemed to him to discount all else that might pass between people.

My old friend, Gene Logsdon, who's a fine writer on agriculture, and lately a novelist, once asked an Amish factory owner, "Do you have a toxic effluent from your factory?" And the owner looked at him in horror. He said, "Our children play around this factory." If you had a local slaughterhouse patronized by local people, who could watch the slaughtering and butchering of their own animals, you wouldn't need the government to inspect for sanitation.

The philanthropist who could not pass a beggar without parting with his money, the nature lover who felt he did not have the right to stamp on a spider let alone mistreat a horse, the humanitarian who opposed slavery because it was the "absolute dependence of one man upon another," was utterly convinced he had every right to keep a young woman subject to his total command and groom her to meet his desires

The story of Thomas Day's quest to create a perfect wife symbolizes an eternal human desire: to craft a supreme being

Yet at a time when people were locked in debate over the significance of nature over nurture, Day's project did not seem quite so outlandish or immoral. As a product of his time, his gender and his rank, he possessed the power and money to pursue his quest, and he therefore believed he had every right to subvert another person to meet his ideals. He was, perhaps, more deluded than wicked

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.

MR. MOUSTAFA There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once know as humanity... He was one of them. What more is there to say?

the entities that possess them, and the extraordinary power that accompanies them, are not necessarily going to also be more ethically advanced than us.

men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.