Quotes About Ethics

What wisdom is there in keeping a person alive above all considerations ? Why should doctors keep restarting someone's heart if they're never going to get well?

Esto es lo que me pasó a mí. Pensé que tenía normas. Yo creía en mis absolutos. Lo hice para la mayoría de las situaciones. Entonces no lo hice. Conforme pasó el tiempo, mi mundo se volvió gris y mis absolutos se oscurecieron. El bien y el mal se disolvieron en lo que sabía que tenía que hacer.

If you violate Nature's laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.

As a scientist, I can not help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. I don't want to have anything to do with such a God.

Goodness and hard work are rewarded with respect.

I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture.

We refuse to have our conscience bound by any work or law, so that by doing this or that we should be righteous, or leaving this or that undone we should be damned.

The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.

It cannot, indeed, be denied, that a good man is more worthy of love than a bad one.

Los chicos malos ya no roban bancos, ahora los compran.

Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

Every yielding to temptation is a hindrance, not a help, to moral development; but every temptation offers what, rightly employed, is an indispensable means of moral development. For all moral development is through temptation to virtue.

The ideal of character always runs beyond the attainment.

Do not think that you can fight corruption without while you let corruption fester within.

There can be no virtue without temptation; for virtue is victory over temptation.

Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do alongside the eternal laws of God, and seeing how it stands by those laws of God.

An untempted soul may be innocent, but cannot be virtuous, for virtue is the choice of right when wrong presses itself upon us and demands our choosing.

A bad God is worse than no God at all.

If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.

We made our own fish-lines, twisting and double-twisting and triple-twisting the silk, ganged on the hooks, bought the long bamboo poles and cut them up, and out of them made our own jointed fishing-rods. We always cleaned our fish ourselves. It was the law of the sport that our fun should not make work for others which we ourselves could do.

We think if we can only take the temptation away from men, men will be virtuous. We are mistaken. Men are made virtuous by confronting temptation.

Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Compromise cannot be allowed in cases where the exact truth is ascertainable.