Quotes About Ethics

The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes. People value it not because it is a good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity.

We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice.

Socrates: I'm afraid that it might actually be sacrilegious to stand idly by while morality is being denigrated and not try to assist as long as one has breath in one's body and a voice to protest with.

I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of [c] the stronger.

For no man is voluntarily bad; but the bad become bad by reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education, things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will.

The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

If you harm a horse do you make him better or worse? Worse.

the creative soul creates not children, but conceptions of wisdom and virtue

For our discussion is about no ordinary matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives.

kata-kata tanpa ketulusan bukan hanya buruk, tapi juga merusak jiwa

Are not they temperate from a kind of intemperance?

there is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth.

It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.

this is the greatest good to man, to discourse daily on virtue, and other things which you have heard me discussing, examining both myself and others

if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his action, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting life a good or a bad man.

For he who is a corrupter of the laws is more than likely to be a corrupter of the young and foolish portion of mankind.

So I spoke the truth when I said that neither I nor you nor any other man would rather do injustice than suffer it: for it is worse.

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

It's not from money that excellence comes, but from excellence money and the other things, all of them, come to be good for human beings, whether in private or in public life.

Eat and drink and sit with the mighty, and make yourself agreeable to them; for from the good you will learn what is good, but if you mix with the bad you will lose the intelligence which you already have.

the champion of justice [...] would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds, and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all.

Those who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it.

SOCRATES: For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him? CRITO: Very true. SOCRATES: Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.

For it is likely that if a city of good men came to be, there would be a fight over not ruling, just as there is now over ruling; and there it would become manifest that a true ruler really does not naturally consider his own advantage but rather that of the one who is ruled.