Quotes About Ethics

I've known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy, He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.

Three things are required of man—to worship the gods, to do no evil, and to maintain manly behavior.

Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years?

We work in a profession that has consequences for the heart

even the worst men wanted to be perceived as better than they were. How else could hypocrisy have risen to such delirious levels?

Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.

I know you're tired of hearing me say this, Guido, but I think plastic bottles are wrong, even though they're certainly not criminal. Though," she quickly added, "I think they will be within a few years. If we have any sense, that is.

Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he'd managed to create his own, different from ours, better.

He hesitated, himself offended by the next question he had to put to her. He told himself that he was like a priest, a doctor, and that what people told him went no further, but he knew that wasn't true, knew that he would respect no confidence if it would lead him to find the person he was looking for.

Brunetti remembered when they found themselves with an excessive catch, they chose to give it away, rather than watch it rot.

She reminds me a bit of those women in nineteenth-century novels, interested in the moral improvement of their inferiors,' she said.

It seems to me it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference," he said. "Between what?" "The criminal and the wrong." "Why do you think that is, Guido?" "I'm not sure. Perhaps because, as you said before, we don't believe in the old things anymore, and we haven't found anything new, anything else, to believe in.

Cicero's Against Verres and its denunciation of a corrupt official, Brunetti's

Where does American money come from? Steel. Railways. You know how it is over there. It doesn't matter if you murder or rob to get it. The trick is in keeping it for a hundred years, and then you're aristocrats.

Brunetti picked up his and took a small sip. 'I'm probably quoting him badly, but somewhere he says that the laws of the state will take care of public crimes, and that's why we need religion, so that we can believe divine justice will take care of private crime.

love trumped principle. Paola tossed out these things

It's a terrible thing, what we did," said Francis abruptly. "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame. I feel bad about it." "Well, of course, I do too," said Henry matter-of-factly. "But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it." Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. "No," he said. "Not that bad.

good doesn't always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions.

I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed.

my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And

It's a terrible thing, what we did," said Francis abruptly. "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame. I feel bad about it.

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.

But how," said Charles, who was close to tears, "how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?" Henry lit a cigarette. "I prefer to think of it," he had said, "as redistribution of matter.

A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world.