Quotes About Ethics

I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness, And put on Intellect; or my thund'rous hammer shall drive thee To wrath, which thou condemnest, till thou obey my voice.

What can I know? Nothing for sure. What ought I to do? Try not to hurt anyone. What may I hope for? For the best (but it won't make any difference).

The idea of a priori moral judgements ('It is morally wrong to inflict gratuitous pain') is completely acceptable to the vast majority of human beings. Only a few philosophers would disagree.

But Raynor wondered, should evil go unpunished just because it's wielded by someone in power? Was

How a company is perceived, Bezos concluded, largely came down to how it behaved, and how its behaviors compared with those of its direct competitors. "Rudeness is not cool," he warned his colleagues. "Defeating tiny guys is not cool," he added. "Polite is cool," he argued, "defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool.

perhaps it is all art and Barnum our one genius (in the arts) on the moral plane

For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, And though late, a sure reward succeeds.

O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell.

What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.

She [Ayn Rand] had to declare that....altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. (About Ayn Rand)

Dr. King's flouting of the law does not justify the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled his rifle on the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, made.

Some people turn to crime, others to ideology.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.

I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man.

Life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.

it's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you.

people seemed to hold that the one sole end of the entire establishment of public office was to elect one man like Sheriff Hampton big enough or at least with sense and character enough to run the county and then fill the rest of the jobs with cousins and inlaws who had failed to make a living at everything else they ever tried.

the town believed that good women dont forget things easily, good or bad, lest the taste and savor of forgiveness die from the palate of conscience.