Quotes About Ethics

As long as people don't find out how awful and abominable man can be to fellow man, their innocence will be left intact.

I love the idea of reading books as a brotherly, sisterly moral obligation to one's people.

God gave animals a lower rank, in the service of man.

A few honest men are better than numbers.

His conduct still right with his argument wrong.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Handsome is that handsome does.

That virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarce worth the sentinel.

Thus, my children, after men have travelled through a few stages in vice, shame forsakes them, and returns back to wait upon the few virtues they have still remaining.

The pain which conscience gives the man who has already done wrong is soon got over. Conscience is a coward; and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent, it seldom has justice enough to accuse.

I am here to accept responsibility for that which I did. I will not accept responsibility for that which I did not do.

There is no moral middle ground. Indifference is not an option. ... For the sake of our children, I implore each of you to be unyielding and inflexible in your opposition to drugs.

In the abstract, a natural disaster can feel more acceptable than the idea of tampering with nature to avert it. This is the same uneasiness that sits at the heart of the deepest concern about geoengineering, concern not about its possible evil consequences, but about the sheer scope of the idea itself.

I haven't, in the 23 years that I have been in the uniformed services of the United States of America, ever violated an order - not one.

The Nation observed, "If you steal $25, you're a thief. If you steal $250,000, you're an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you're a financier.

Without a moral center -- there can be no string family. And without family, we one and all suffer.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. (The autocrat of the breakfast-table)

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.

For my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part…. If the existing code does not permit district attorneys to have a hand in such dirty business [wiretapping], it does not permit the judge to allow such iniquities to succeed.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.