Quotes About Ethics

You may lie.

The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.

Any community's arm of force--military, police, security--needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

The objective is to win -- fairly, squarely, decently, by the rules, but to win.

There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.

There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians.... Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods?

The most important thing about virtue is to talk as if you're in favor of it.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.

Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.

Nearly everybody yields up his conscience, his practical judgment, into the keeping of others.

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime.

Do not turn yourself from an end into a means -- one does not justify the other.

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

Be generous before you are just. Do not temper mercy with justice.

It is so easy to do a dirty thing with self-satisfaction when it consists in abstaining from action.

In a doctrine so simple, consistency is no merit.

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

To what gulfs A single deviation from the track Of human duties leads even those who claim The homage of mankind as their born due, And find it, till they forfeit it themselves!