Quotes About Ethics

The "man of Christ" knows that the collapse of systems is always preceded by the collapse of individuals. Camelot began to give way to the world the moment Lancelot and Guinevere gave way to their appetites.

Never have so many been schooled so much as to their rights while, at the same time, being taught that there are no behavioral wrongs. If we can but realize that Satan is selfishness at the end of its journey, then we can see where our selfish society is headed.

Morality is a variable construct that grows to include more dictums relative to the wealth and safety of the population concerned.

Morality, he often argued, is a purely human invention only to be indulged in times of plenty.

The test of character was in what you did, not what you thought about doing.

However, let us not presume politicians are ineffectual, for whenever the bombs and napalm are falling, the mines taking off legs and the bullets punching holes in human flesh, they are always behind the firing line, deciding who should die.

technology is merely a tool and any blame always rests squarely on the one wielding that tool. Saul

Religion is all-too-often a refuge for scoundrels.

If it is wrong for you to take money from someone else who earned it, to take their money by force for your own needs, then it is certainly just as wrong for you to demand that the government step forward and do this dirty work for you.

We Americans seem to derive a great deal of pleasure out of punishing those who fail to measure up to our standards of morality and conduct--regardless of whether or not their conduct has any affect on our personal rights to life, liberty, and property.

Plato wrote in The Republic during the fourth century BC, "Where there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

How far are we willing to extend our freedoms? Where is the Exodus for people convicted of innocent, consensual crimes?

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

The lid on the first case of spot-fixing in Twenty20 cricket had been blown. On

My dad was a big believer in treating people well, oftentimes even when he himself wasn't well.

Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.

And whenever the prime concern in life is money-making, then you have trickery and brutality and wrong. I'm saying that, not from what I have heard, but from what I have observed in a long life among our own folk.

That's not hunting," I wrote, "that's just shooting.

We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.

The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.

I am an optimist because I think it might just be possible for people to learn how to recognize empty, false, self-serving, or inhumane language, and therefore to protect themselves from at least some of its spiritually debasing consequences.

A bureacrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battary of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he may never have been asked to answer for his actions.