Quotes About Ethics

Movies, TV, sports, come and go, but what you stand for is what people remember. Mandela, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy are people who really stood for something and were willing to die for it. You don't see a whole lot of that any more.

To refer everything to a "plurality of ethical commitments" means that we make no demands on anyone and acknowledge no one's right to make any demands on ourselves. The suspension of judgment logically condemns us to solitude. Unless we are prepared to make demands on one another, we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life.

An outlaw outlook calls on every citizen to create, not conform; to decide what is right and wrong and act on it, not just baa along with the rest of the herd.

Rule #1 of Step #1," he replied. "No lobbying.

The friend of wisdom is also a friend of the myth. —ARISTOTLE

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs?

We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.

Indeed, if the good life entails nothing more than the joyless performance of good deeds, then it is not a life that is lived but merely one that is ploddingly enacted. How can we urge good character upon individuals and devise strategies for encouraging character if there is not an experiential payoff?

Being able to conceive moral contexts from multiple sides and being able to more deeply understand each person involved are major achievements in moral development.

Bravery raises the moral and social conscience of a society.

Putnam argued that the concept of psychological bravery has not been properly recognized in ethics and asserted that the psychological bravery involved in facing fears generated by our own habits is essential to well-being.

Even though I don't personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching.

What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that's how I approached the part.

I doubt that the men would lift a finger to save him from the hanging he so justly deserves.

Thus, Ford was willing enough to participate in Nazi anti-Semitism if it turned a profit.

Mental patients and disabled people appear to have been the first ones the Nazis actually gassed; they killed at least 50,000 in an experimental euthanasia program code-named Aktion T4 that began in the fall of 1939.

Flick beat all but one of the slave labor and plunder charges, because three prominent U.S. judges concluded that the director and owner of a corporation should not be held accountable for slavery and looting by his companies, unless the prosecution could prove that he personally ordered each particular crime to be carried out.

But the business elite could not make even that claim. For them, cooperation in years of genocide became simply a matter of doing business.

Pell thought both aristocrats and big businessmen to be "totally selfish," as Arthur Schlesinger, jr., has put it, "but the aristocrat at least thought of his grandsons, while the bourgeois thought only of himself."2

Do what is right and be prepared to pay the price.

Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.

The only people who lawyer up faster than dirty cops are dirty lawyers.

Why was the Law given? This is widely misunderstood. The first reason is to provide a standard of righteousness. How do you know right from wrong? By looking at God's standard, not relativism—God makes the rules, which were given to expose and identify sin.

Righteousness can never be legislated. It is a matter of the heart.