Quotes About Ethics

Shame is a scarce commodity in politics

Do not expect to be applauded when you do the right thing, and do not expect to be forgiven when you err. But even your enemies will respect commitment - and a conscience at peace is worth more than a thousand tainted victories

Being what we humans are, what else could we do but wrong?

We all cast our own shadows and chose where they fall, and the lives of men and women and otters and dogs and whales are linked forever across the reaches of time. We distance ourselves from them with our hunger for flesh, or our carelessness, or our cruelty. But what of the forces that bind us together?

Human beings exercise responsibilities within a social setting and a framework of obligations which transcend the principle of intelligence.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

It was the right thing to do, but it could not be sustained. Not here. The

Ken Lay has, does and will continue to accept responsibility for the fall of Enron. He was the man at the controls. But failure is not a crime.

As it sometimes happened, the good suffered for the faults of the bad.

Goodly intentions are no use without goodly sums of money, Watson.

I do my own habitual scan. I've already completed mental check-offs of the drunks, the painfully pierced, and there have been two iced coffees and a couple sharing a starfruit. Miriam is back in her spot. I go over and ask her, "If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?

But women please note: with great power, comes great responsibility. A responsibility to yourself, a responsibility to the world, a responsibility to your world—and everything you let in it. This

It was the most important moment in human history, the telling of the first lie. That's what separates us from the other animals. It has nothing to do with humans thinking on a higher plane or having easily available credit. We lie to each other. We deliberately mislead.

We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know what crimes have been committed. - The Man in the Iron Mask (155)

Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses.

Specialists debated whether to pull the plug, but Texas only executes people on death row, not when they're brain-dead, because it might mean culling most of their politicians.

As a forensic psychologist, I have met killers and psychopaths and sociopaths, but I refuse to define people as being good or evil. Wrongdoing is an absence of something good rather than something fated, or written in our DNA, or forced upon us by shitty parents, or careless teachers, or cruel friendships. Evil is not a state, it is a 'property', and when a person is in possession of enough 'property', it sometimes begins to define them.

let me tell you what's more immoral. Doing nothing. Sitting back in your comfortable chair in your comfortable home thinking that just because you sponsor a child in Zambia you're doing enough.

Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understand what he's saying but cannot accept a world that is so brutally black and white. Murder, rape and torture are the apparatus of terrorists, not of civilized societies. If we become like them, what hope do we have?

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.' And another time, 'The grass isn't greener on the other side. It's greener where you water it.

Every society gets the criminals it deserves" is her philosophy. "And the police force it's willing to pay for, rather than the one it insists upon.

Joe doesn't subscribe to the theory that we get the luck we deserve. Fairness is a hair color, not something to be balanced on a set of scales.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.