Quotes About Ethics

Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings," he writes, "is a step away from Jonestown.

A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.

I rationalize this by telling myself that while the work might be ignoble, it's not necessarily evil. We're not Hitler - we're just annoying people.

In addition to pool installers and flower shops, our customers include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers, or gaming Google's search algorithm, or figuring out which kind of misleading subject line is most likely to trick someone into opening a message. Online marketing is not quite as sleazy as Internet porn, but it's not much better, either.

Online marketing is not quite as sleazy as Internet porn, but it's not much better, either.

We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interesting that we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money NOT helping other people.

I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry.

Journalists should denounce government by public opinion polls.

Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art

George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address, warned future generations "to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

Looking back, the only ones who really paid for Abu Ghraib were the enlisted personnel, who were following orders, and General Taguba, who brought the problem to light.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

I don't think that sin and pursuing happiness are not necessarily the same thing.

the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.

responsibility is the accounting of one's actual response relative to one's ability for response (response/ability).

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

Once in a while, I like to polish my halo by taking on a case pro bono.

Killing animals is the most destructive thing you can do in the fashion industry", she told me. "The tanneries, the chemicals, the deforestation, the use of landmass and grain and water, the cruelty - it's a nonstarter. The minute yo are not killing an animal to make a shoe or a bag you are ahead of the game

It's all about eating real food! Sweet potatoes come from the ground, maple syrup comes out of a tree, carrots grow in the dirt, bees make honey, and hopefully we can all find more and more pasture-raised, grain-free, cruelty-free animals for protein. Because what our animals eat becomes what we eat, too. I don't see ever getting too far from these principles. Real food is medicine, and I like to put the highest-quality food into the only body I will ever have.

Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.

Leadership is not about doing what's popular, it is about doing what's right

But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life.

Tis very strange men should be so fond of being wickeder than they are.