Quotes About Ethics

You cannot disgrace a disgraceful man; you cannot make a shameless man feel ashamed; you cannot make a cockroach a cockroach, because it is already a cockroach!

It's simply a matter of creative accounting.

If presidents can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

The city fathers discredited themselves with their silly exercise in extreme social rectitude.

I think I'd rather be beautiful. Beautiful makes evolving into any sort of a person with morals and character very difficult.

Because karma, you know what they say about that. (They use a swear word.)

as the AI researcher Pedro Domingos so memorably put it, "People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world."21

Reflecting on real-life machine morality, the mathematician Norbert Wiener noted as long ago as 1960 that "we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire."18

People don't obey a law just because they're told to. But if they know the consequences of an act and do it anyway, then that's a conscious and informed choice and they have no cause to protest the punishment.

There are worse things than a lie and there are better things than the truth!

No, no, no, no,no,' he gasped. 'You can't bring up your mum and dad while your hand is down there, Finke

No. But it's like the argument `don't donate to third-world countries because the money mightn't get to them.' People only say that because it makes them feel better about the fact that they do nothing.

Bribes over two dollars are tax deductible

Nothing worse than a weak man with ambition, who gains power because those before him died rather than because his ideals were grand.

Sluts and losers are tolerable to my friends. But a person with a social conscience is from Pluto.

But it's the look in his eyes that I can't help responding to, and I think to myself, forget the girlfriend. Just go for it. And I want to. But his girlfriend is there, a smiler, not a grinner.

There's no such thing as Atticus Finch.' I shrug. 'It'd be good if there was, though.

The trust of a people comes from the goodness of their leaders.

The same way most people get away with the wrong thing," she said. "Wealth. . .

The Greek poets had praised virtue as taking several specific forms: wisdom; courage; moderation; justice; and piety.

A clear division between good and evil, right and wrong, would simplify everything, but life was rarely simple.

James Shannon delivered the convention's opening address, which set the tone for the two-day event. His remarks were nothing if not unequivocal. Any threat to the biblically sanctioned right to hold slaves, Shannon assured his audience, "is just cause of war between the separate states." Those who advocated restrictions on slavery he denounced as "liars, yelping curs, assassins, knaves, Negro thieves and horse thieves."14 After

There is never a deed so foul that something couldn't be said for the guy; that's why there are lawyers.

Look at the creeps who favor capital punishment; you get the feeling they want to be the ones to pull the switch.