Quotes About Ethics

There are two reasons to not tell the truth -- because lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt.

I believe in Hell . . . but it's here on earth." He shakes his head. "Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once.

Entre uma boa acção e uma má acção existem mil tons de cinzento.

It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man. —Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower

She knew, even at that young age, that you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart.

Do you owe someone only the care they provided for you? Or does believing that make you as culpable as they were?

whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I'm always glad bioethics wasn't

There's really no such thing as a right or wrong choice. We don't make decisions. Out decisions make us.

Piety and pity were a little to close to each other for my tastes.

If you chose to stop a loved one's suffering—either before it began or during the process—was that murder, or mercy?

believe in Hell… but it's here on earth." He shakes his head. "Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once.

Good people are good people, religion has nothing to do with it.

The first time you make a decision like that, a decision which rubs against all your morals, is the hardest. The second time, though, is not so hard. And that makes you feel a fraction better about the first time. And so on. But you can keep dividing and dividing and you'll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no.

But my mother also would have been the first to tell me that good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing." "What's the difference?" "The best thing is what you think should be done. The rightest thing is what needs to be done—when you think not just of you and how you feel, but also the extra stuff—who else is involved, and what's happened before, and what the rules say.

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's because it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.

The fundamental sense of freedom involves something far larger than simply being left alone to follow one's own best self-interest. The idea of freedom is considerably more than private value. Individual autonomy is nested within a complex of obligations individuals have toward one another. Obligations are required for freedom to be moral. Far from being individualistic, freedom is an essential social idea. (Schwarz 2005:4)

If I live my life independently of my brother, and he destroys himself as a result of my independence, is there blood on my hands? Am I my brother's enabler?

Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody's satisfaction that 'I was just following orders' was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact … but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh.' — Martin Luther King, Jr.

He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from, he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.

When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.

Innocence ain't all it's cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don't know any better. That's innocence.

It's pretty hard not to like her," he says. "Even when you know you shouldn't.