Quotes About Ethics

Quando la tragedia umana si è compiuta, la si passa ai giornalisti affinché, banalizzandola, la trasformino in spettacolo.

You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accomodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense of life?

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you

There is no divinely mandated link between morality and competence.

To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning of the Beatitudes, this cryptic ethical core of Jesus' teaching?

The late Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical American author, wrote: "For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But—often with tears in their eyes—they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate choice of their own mothers.

C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of power, which are rules of ungrace

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

What would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus' sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?

Andy Rooney, the late commentator on the 60 Minutes television show, once said, "I've decided I'm against abortion. I think it's murder. But I have a dilemma in that I much prefer the pro-choice to the pro-life people. I'd much rather eat dinner with a group of the former.

The world runs by ungrace. Everything depends on what I do.

in John Adams' words, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person's ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coerce. For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil. We must exercise the skill of ethical surgeons in deciding which moral principles apply to society at large and how best to apply them.

Don't the Bible say we must love everybody?" "O, the Bible! To be sure, it says a great many things; but, then, nobody ever thinks of doing them." HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

President Bill Clinton tried to make that distinction. As a Christian, he said, he sought guidance on moral issues from the Bible. As president of the United States, though, he could not automatically propose that everything immoral should therefore be made illegal.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion," cautioned T. S. Eliot.

Does the Christian emphasis on love, grace, and forgiveness have any relevance outside quarreling families or church encounter groups? In a world where force matters most, a lofty ideal like forgiveness may seem as insubstantial as vapor.

Caught up in righteous—and wholly appropriate—revulsion over Serbian atrocities, the world overlooks one fact: the Serbs are simply following the terrible logic of unforgiveness.

I know of only two alternatives to hypocrisy: perfection or honesty.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion

it seems so unfair, to forgive injustice. I am caught between forgiveness and justice.

He resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.