Quotes About Ethics

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that's important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.

Why should your conscience be any more reliable than your rotting teeth or your quite special defect of eyesight?

We have taken government and turned it into a surrogate parent, even a surrogate self, as we let regulation replace conscience. We

I urge not that we assume that love will provide a reliable foundation for knowledge but that we nonetheless keep the requirements of love of neighbor foremost in our interpretations of Scripture. We should consider, for example, love to be a necessary criterion (a minimum) when defending an interpretation of Scripture even if it cannot be a sufficient criterion that will guarantee ethical interpretation.

The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it. —Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules whose would you use

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation, for your character is what you are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

w]e should not think that we can do enough simply by buying fuel-efficient cars, insulating our houses, and setting up a windmill to make our own electricity. That is all wonderful, but it does little or nothing to stop global warming and also does not fulfill our real moral obligations, which are to get governments to do their job to prevent the disaster of excessive global warming.

unquestioning obedience to "absolute" rules—turns out to be the single least productive thing we can do for our children's moral development.

The highest ethical duty is often to discard the outmoded ethics of the past." —Corliss Lamont, humanist philosopher

Children's understanding of morality is the same whether they're of one religion, another religion or no religion. But if it's simply indoctrination, it's worse than doing nothing. It interferes with moral development." —Larry Nucci, director, Office for Studies in Moral Development, University of Illinois

Intellectual and ethical maturity can be measured in part by a person's willingness to engage in constant reflection on what he or she holds to be true and good.

Children," Mrs. Oakenfeld sighed. "I do not want you to be good to avoid being punished. I do not want you to be good so that you can receive rewards. I want you to be good," she stressed, "because it is the right thing to do. You are very formidable adversaries, but don't you see that when you work against eachother, you just cancel eachother out?

There is not a right and a wrong answer to every question.

Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.

But whose idea of decency? And decency for who? Speak up and tell us what decency is. Tell us how much better a decent dead man feels than an indecent live one.

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can't talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead.

There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.

The child tortures the fly because he has the power to do so, and had not yet learned how mercifully to kill.

And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow?

What's so noble about being dead?

There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.

I think I like big issues, but I don't believe in God or religion.

Individuals create themselves through their moral choices. By freely and repeatedly choosing certain sorts of things, an individual shapes their character, and through their character their future.