Quotes About Ethics

the qualities that led the top Nazis to commit and tolerate acts of horror existed in many people, living in many places.

Psychology, above all, is applying human understanding in a scientific manner. . . . The only profession I have ever encountered which separates the role of a human being from his professional activity," he declared, "was the role of the SS man.

About fifty yards ahead a white-tailed deer was slowly picking his way across the snow-covered rocks and roots. As soon as I saw him I knew instantly that I didn't want him to die. He was so beautiful and at ease in the woods. This was his home, not mine, and I suddenly felt like a killer who had broken into his house and was about to shoot him. I watched and held my breath.

Someone once said anyone can be great under rosy circumstances, but the true test of character is measured by how well a person makes decisions during difficult times.

in 1955 the CIA released the whooping cough virus over Tampa, Florida without telling anyone, so they could see how quickly it would spread; they got their data, and twelve innocent civilians died.

During the Cold War, the US Government conducted a number of highly unethical experiments on their own citizens. In one, they placed blowers on schools and low-income housing projects in St. Louis to disperse zinc cadmium sulphide, a fine fluorescent powder.

After an earthquake in China, the generous tobacco companies stepped in to pay for the rebuilding of the area's schools. However, there is an ethical question to be asked here. Is it right that a school should now be called 'Sichuan Tobacco Project Hope Primary School'? And furthermore, should the company have been allowed to paint a huge message on the school's walls which says Tobacco can help you become an achiever? I'm sure you can guess the answer...

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

There are a lot of grotesqueries in politics, not the least of which is the fund-raising side.

I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.

This could never be a crime in any society which deems himself enlightened.

A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine's a business today. It's a business.

My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience.

If Christ can die in a barn, I think the death of a human in a van is not so bad.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

The Supreme Court of the United States... has validated the Nazi method of execution in... concentration camps, starving them to death.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn puts it, "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

If only there were evil people out there insidiously committing evil deeds and it was only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

It is through virtuous conduct, through loving-kindness and compassion, and through understanding of truth that one becomes noble.

it is in the very fundamentals of evil that one always condemns it when they see it but rationalizes it when they do it.

There are only three kinds of people in the universe, no matter what their race or form. They are scoundrels, hypocrites, and sheep.

When a nation was faced with a choice between abstract principle or complete self-interest, it took self-interest every time.

Was having someone else hunt and kill for you any different, morally, than doing it yourself, or was it worse because it removed you from the act while still requiring the kill?