Quotes About Ethics

Mrs. Horowitz said, It is inexcusable that humans think they can murder other animals because they murder themselves. I must tell you, I hate humans. They terrify me. They should, I continued. I interviewed Yehudi Menuhin the other day.

The quality of student work has definitely gone downhill since they discontinued the use of the whipping post. -Silk

just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

You won't be able to do it wrong, Durnik--any more than you'd be able to lie or cheat or steal. It's built into you to do it right, so don't worry about it. That's all very well for you to say, Mistress, Pol, he replied, but if you don't mind, I will worry about it just a bit--privately of course.

Morality deals with what we might like to do, but politics deals with what we must do. There's no connection between them at all.

Is it? If somebody forces you to do something and there's no possible way to avoid it, is it really sin?

Power is power, Garion. The results are the same. You don't have to hurt people if you don't want to.

La chiesa ha trasformato la corruzione in una forma d'arte basata sulla pura avidità.

In your view, evil's no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be.

Selon Chondler, conclut-il, il n'existe qu'une seule vertu : la modération. Encore ne faut-il pas la pratiquer avec excès.

It is better that you die than that you put a stain upon your soul.

It's a thin line between what we're calling acceptable and not acceptable. As a leader, you're supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you? No.

Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est. (Roughly, They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.)

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

Te occidere possunt sed te edere possunt nefas est.

Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way

if you think the corporations are evil and it's the government's job to make them moral, you're deflecting your own responsibility to civics. You're making the government your big brother and the corporation the evil bully your big brother's supposed to keep off you at recess.

Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (Roughly, 'They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier').

Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are.

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

true decency was very different from pathological generosity, because pathological generosity did not take into account the feelings of the people who were the object of the generosity?