Quotes About Ethics

Grant that a man has a right to appropriate such natural elements as he can use, has he any right to appropriate more than he can use? Has a guest in such a case as I have supposed a right to appropriate more than he needs and make other people stand up? That is what is done.

What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.

A person's conscience will object and accuse when an action may be harmful to themselves and others.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights confront each other.

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.

Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI's challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.

To me there is not only right or wrong but many shades in between...The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes [illegible] in a dilemma of evaluating what is right...Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can't even begin to comprehend.

A insistência impensada em fazer o que é certo pode virar desculpa para deixar de pensar em todas as consequências das políticas, afirma ele. As pessoas que querem usar o poder para mudar o mundo são com frequência idealistas, apesar de os realistas serem vistos mais comumente como pessoas dispostas a usar a força.

Good character does not assure worldly success, or triumph in statecraft, but it does provide firm grounding in victory and consolation in failure.

Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.

If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won't crumble.

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.