Quotes About Ethics

Strength of character may be learned at work, but beauty of character is learned at home.

The peculiarity of ill-temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposition. This compatibility of ill-temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.

You ought to live in such a way that you would be perfectly happy to have everything that you do known. And if you don't do that, maybe you'd better change a little bit.

If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.

Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.

We are as liable to be corrupted by books as we are by companions.

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others have done evil.

The worst of men generally have the words rogue and villain most in their mouths, as the lowest of all wretches are the aptest to cry out low in the pit.

It is not enough that your designs, nay that your actions, are intrinsically good, you must take care they shall appear so.

Your religion...serves you only for an excuse for your faults, but is no incentive to your virtue.

a good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself, which the neglect of legislators hath forgotten to supply.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business.

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

Don't cheapen the product; don't cheapen the wage; don't overcharge the public. Put brains into the method, and more brains, and still more brains—do things better than ever before; and by this means all parties to business are served and benefited.

2. A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another man—criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the condition of one's fellow man—to rule by force instead of by intelligence.

Abbiamo bisogno di persone brave, non solo di brave persone.

There is no reason why a man who is willing to work should not be able to work and to receive the full value of his work. There is equally no reason why a man who can but will not work should not receive the full value of his services to the community. He should most certainly be permitted to take away from the community an equivalent of what he contributes to it. If he contributes nothing he should take away nothing. He should have the freedom of starvation. We

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.