Quotes About Ethics

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

Nobody talked as much as Kiki did about the possibility of fairness.

You can't imbibe someone's success by f*cking them.

It is not, Ianthe, a priest's function to be a bottomless well of woolly uncritical forgiveness. That would only devalue virtue.

A demon, if you prefer the term; although to be honest, the difference between god and a demon is really only a matter of perspective.

We're gods, not saints. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. Everyone scores off everyone else.

Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.

There was no denying that whores surrounded him. Not just the women on the flat screen, but the political whores who'd attended his meeting. He replayed his own conciliatory words and wondered whether he was one as well

To not do what you can to protect someone, that's cowardly.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.

A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.

It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray.

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.

But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Her hands quieted. Yeah. Because even if the law says that no one is responsible for anyone else, helping someone who needs it is the right thing to do. I sat down beside her, close enough that the skin of her arm hummed right next to mine. You really believe that? She looked down at her lap Yeah. Then how, I asked, can you walk away from me?

There was no black or white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. People were just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.

There are two reasons not to tell the truth--becuase lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt.