Quotes About Ethics

There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide.

I know they argue about whether or not it's right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn't about that. It wasn't what the lawyers did. It wasn't what the doctors did, it wasn't what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

After all your years climbing around in people's heads like a cranial janitor, do you think people know why they do things? People rationalize, they turn their delusions into something romantic that they can disguise as ethics or principles or ideals. People are selfish, Doctor- odiously, monstrously, but in so small and paltry a monstrousness that we barely notice it.

It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he'd pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else.

You do not want to be a noble person? She held her thumb and index finger close together. A little bit? He shook his head. I've gt nothing against noble people, I've just noticed they rarely live past forty. Neither do gangsters. True, he said, but we eat in better restaurants. (Live By Night - Dennis Lehane)

Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.

Hell, everyone's nice until some kind of hard choice is put in front of them. Coronado: Stories

I just notice people sometimes mistake their life choices for their moral ones.

conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority.

But what? No one's good, no one's bad. Everyone's just trying to make their way.

A church that abandoned God's moral revelation had nothing to offer a lost culture.

People who know the difference between right and wrong do the wrong thing all the time. You know why? Because they can.

One of the saddest facts of the human condition is that most people follow the herd. Sometimes, of course, the herd is morally right. That, obviously, is the ideal. But most good is achieved by individuals who have the courage to part from the majority when it is morally wrong. In addition, people tend to act worse in groups than when alone. The herd, not to mention the mob, emboldens people to do bad things they would rarely do if they had no such support.

It is almost impossible to do good without wisdom. All the good intentions in the world are likely to be worthless without wisdom. Many of the horrors of the twentieth century were supported by people with good intentions who lacked wisdom.

Compromise, while at times morally necessary or at least justifiable, is more often only the first permission for a person (or society) to begin a long downhill descent.

Without God, right and wrong are just personal beliefs. Personal opinions. I think shoplifting is okay, you don't.

A society can survive bad donkey drivers. But it cannot survive contempt for truth—whether inside or outside a courtroom.

If nothing is holy, nothing is profane.

If the question is 'How do we stop enormous evils in the world?' the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently 'War.' Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed 'war is not the answer.

Morally judging cultures (except Christian, Israeli and American cultures) is forbidden by the left. Indeed not judging non-Western cultures is the very definition of 'multiculturalism'.

If you go through life cheating others, you will go through life expecting others to cheat you. Liars expect to be lied to; cheaters expect to be cheated; and so on.

The world's thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused.

Who, pray tell, is for leaving the naked unclothed and the hungry without food? Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism advocated caring for the helpless millennia before Marx was born. So, when the Jewish, Christian, or secular Left tell us repeatedly that they are for clothing the naked, they really mean two other things: (1) Their opponents are not for feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and (2) Only those who affirm Left-wing policies are.