Quotes About Ethics

Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.

in its people decisions, management must demonstrate that it realizes that integrity is one absolute requirement of a manager, the one quality that he has to bring with him and cannot be expected to acquire later on. And management must demonstrate that it requires the same integrity of itself.

right conduct can never be established by procedure.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

The top man who concludes that his company needs to grow but who also then realizes that he does not want to change himself and his behavior has, in conscience, only one line of action open to him. He has to step aside. Even if he legally owns the company, he does not own the lives of other people. A company is not a child—and even with a human child, the time comes when the parent has to accept that the child has grown up and needs to be independent and on his own.

Good intentions are no excuse for incompetence. And the manager who believes that social consciousness is a substitute for managing his business—or his hospital or his university—so that it produces the results for the sake of which it exists, is either a fool or a knave or both.

Its five business principles are "respect for humans," "customer satisfaction," "social responsibility," "value creation," and "innovation orientation.

Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.

Hull also argues that the reason why fraud in science is so much more serious a crime than theft, even in cases where public well-being is not affected, has to do with these sorts of factors. In a case of theft or plagiarism, the only person harmed is the one stolen from. But when a case of fraud is discovered, all the scientists who used the fraudulent work will find their work on that topic deemed unreliable, and their work will not be used.

This is what is called dying for your country, but it is actually selling your soul to a few profiteers for a shilling, and being massacred to satisfy their selfish purposes. And they call it WAR--and a legitimate thing at that. -Private Arthur Wrench, Headquarters, 154th Brigade, 51st Division

Austen is a moralist, but, as John Lauber has put it, she is not a punitive moralist. Sometimes her villains receive no more serious punishment than to achieve their desires. Often that is punishment enough.

Socrates: "The corruption of the best things are the worst things." Or, "The best, when corrupted, become the worst." As one of your English poets has said, "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

That's what's so striking about the title of Kushner's book: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. How is that fair? Well, the answer to that is that there are no good people.

For any act to be morally right, three things are necessary: (1) right act, (2) right motive, and (3) right circumstances. If any one of these factors is not right, the act is wrong.

Psychology can make us feel good, but religion can make us be good.

The meaning of life is to become a saint.

It is much easier to fail to love your parents than to fail to love your children. That is why there is a commandment that commands love and respect to parents, but not to children. In an age of abortion, there ought to be an eleventh commandment against neglecting, harming, abusing, or even murdering your own children.

If human life becomes cheapened, it becomes cheapened at both ends. Parents are killed, by euthanasia, when they become a "burden" to their children; and children are killed, by abortion, when they become a "burden" to their parents. All societies in history would regard these two sins as two of the most heartless and inhuman possible sins. To kill your parents is to kill yourself, your own past; and to kill your children is to kill yourself, your own future.

Only when there is virtue in souls can there be peace and happiness in society.

St. Thomas is as practical and plain and reasonable in ethics as Aristotle, or Confucius, or your uncle.

There is no such thing as an involuntary sin.

In fact, educated people can justify sins more easily than uneducated people can, because they are clever enough to rationalize their sins away.

Furthermore, the most popular modern answer to the question of what it means to be a good person is to be kind. Do not make other people suffer. If it doesn't hurt anyone, it's O.K. By this standard, God is not good it he lets us suffer. But by ancient standards, God might be good even though he lets us suffer, if he does it for the sake of the greater end of happiness, perfection of life and character and soul, that is, self.

Plato was right when he said that all evil comes from ignorance. He forgot that ignorance also comes from evil.