Quotes About Ethics

If you disapprove of violence, then you can't think there is any age when violence is appropriate.

If it doesn't seem nice, appropriate, or right, don't do it.

Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money.

Politicisation of armed forces should not be done.

The arms business is an absolutely acceptable business.

If an artiste doesn't turn up on the sets on time, I will lose my cool.

I haven't done anything that I'm ashamed of.

There's nothing I've done which I'm ashamed of or I thought was actually bad.

I'm ashamed of what I did.

Doing his own benefactions without hope of a celestial harvest, he thought himself on a nobler plane than religious men whom he always accused for making, as he called it, terms with God.

I need not warn you to be discreet; that is the first virtue of any man who hopes to hold public appointments.

Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity.

Have you a mind to marry? You hang a stone around your neck; for if you marry for money, what becomes of our exalted notions of honor and so forth? You might as well fly in the face of social conventions at once. Is it nothing to crawl like a serpent before your wife, to lick her mother's feet, to descend to dirty actions that would sicken swine — faugh! — never mind if you at least make your fortune.

À força de falar, um homem acaba por acreditar no que diz; ao passo que se pode agir contra o próprio pensamento sem viciá-lo e ganhar uma causa má sem sustentar que seja boa, como o faz o advogado ao pleitear.

But duties, my friend, are not sentiments. To do what we ought is by no means to do what we like. A man who would give his life enthusiastically for a woman must be ready to die coldly for his country.

Cuando la doctrina del ¿Que pagas? reemplace al ¿Que piensas? y pase a ser patrimonio del pueblo. ¿Que sera del país? pag179

In short, your good points will become your faults, your faults will be vices, and your virtues crime.

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait. The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten, if the crime is committed in a respectable way.

an honest man is the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the plunder.

The physician strains towards good as an artist towards beauty, each impelled by that grand sentiment which we call virtue.

The common herd of humanity feels an involuntary respect for any person who can rise above it, and is not over-particular as to the means by which they rise.

whatever rung of the social ladder they are perched, when any interest, no matter what, draws them from their own line of obedience and induces them to grasp at power. In their eyes, as in those of politicians, all means to an end are justifiable

We must all agree that legality would be a fine thing for social scoundrelism IF THERE WERE NO GOD.

Corruption has come to him with fortune, — as it always does!" he said to himself