Quotes About Ethics

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

Only free people have an incentive to be virtuous. Only people who bear the consequences of their own acts will care about those consequences and try to learn from their mistakes.

I'm not a vegetarian. But I think people who are vegetarians, they are actually more virtuous than the rest of us. I think they should be admired.

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

To be a clergyman, and all that is compassionate and virtuous, ought to be the same thing.

You can be a virtuous person without faith in God.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Shaming people into being virtuous doesn't change behaviour.

If venereal delight and the power of propagating the species were permitted only to the virtuous, it would make the world very good.

Even in decline, a virtuous man increases the beauty of his behavior. A burning stick, though turned to the ground, has its flame drawn upwards.

Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice; and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

Laws don't really restrain people. Ninety-eight percent of people follow a virtuous course with or without laws.

What makes you a good citizen makes you a good Christian... Obey the law of your land by not crossing the borders of your nation with Ebola virus.

I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that.

If our principles are only our principles when it is convenient for us, when they align with our visceral emotional responses, then they are, in fact, not principles at all.

To me, it really seems visible today that ethics is not something exterior to the economy, which, as technical matter, could function on its own; rather, ethics is an interior principle of the economy itself, which cannot function if it does not take account of the human values of solidarity and reciprocal responsibility.

Presidents are not only the country's principal policy chief, shaping the nation's domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values.

I am not attracted to those politicians who are short on vision and only want to make money. I like those who have vision.

More is required of public officials than slogans and handshakes and press releases. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision of the future.

One thing that attracted me to Buddhism was the support for this larger vision of values.

Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.