Quotes About Ethics

If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.

Kindness) is much more a sign of character than mere niceness. Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen. -David Levithan (Every Day)

And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular - but one must take it because it is right.

That's the problem with having a moral code. We want to destroy the jerkish part of the jerks, but we want to save the human being underneath.

The more kindness and justice are challenged, the more we must embrace them. Only when you are challenged - and only when you challenge yourself - do you discover what truly matters.

Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten - well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed

Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen

That would have been the worst kind of violation, to read you words uninvited.

Choose your actions wisely.

The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.

The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after

I don't know what good I could do. None of us does. That doesn't let us off the hook.

It's exhausting, trying to make a bad person act good. You can see why it's so much easier for them to be bad.

I know there's a twisted code of honor about never tattling on another student, never speaking up against someone who's done you wrong. I know I will only make it worse by breaking this code. But the code of honor was written by bullies for the protection of bullies, and I don't want to follow it.

Invoking the moral high ground somehow makes you lose it. Using a secret as a weapon makes you almost as bad as the transgressor.

A guy who advertises his own goodness is just another kind of asshole.

I would rather lose the game than play it. I would rather be hurt than be mean. Because I can live with myself if I'm hurt. I don't think I could live with myself if I were mean.

Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a compound of pleasure and aversion. Both are deeply rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated.

Human isn't a scientific concept at all. It's a folk-concept that means, roughly, one of us. As Rorty insightfully observes, such people "are morally offended Ã¢â'¬Â¦ by the suggestion that they treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human.

Subhumans, it was believed, are beings that lack that special something that makes us human. Because of this deficit, they don't command the respect that we, the truly human beings, are obliged to grant one another. They can be enslaved, tortured, or even exterminated—treated in ways in which we could not bring ourselves to treat those whom we regard as members of our own kind. This phenomenon is called dehumanization.

Science is a tool, and if we were an esentially kind and peaceful species, it would not occur to us to use this tool for destructive purposes.

People have moral standing and inanimate objects don't—people can be harmed, but inanimate objects can only be damaged. But where do all the other life-forms stand? Oddly enough, our judgments about this depend in large measure on where we position them on the great chain of being. This ancient, discredited, prescientific model of the cosmos still unconsciously serves as a guideline for our moral judgments.

even the most zealous vegans can weed their garden and wipe out untold millions of germs with disinfectants ("green" ones, of course) without suffering a single pang of guilt.

the closer we judge a creature is to us on the hierarchy, the more inclined we are to grant it moral standing.