Quotes About Ethics

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them good or bad.

Power is when you have every justification to kill someone, and then you don't.

Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness.

True liberty is not the power to live as we please, but to live as we ought.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

There is no power or authority without responsibility, and he who accepts the one cannot escape or evade the other.

The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good.

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.

In the old days all you needed was a handshake. Nowadays you need forty lawyers.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.

This House cannot function without an open, accountable, and independent ethics process; and the molestation of that process by the majority is an abuse of power that cannot stand.

Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.

Politics is not about power. Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people's lives.

Irresponsible power is inconsistent with liberty, and must corrupt those who exercise it.

Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

Small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.

I've said this before, and I say it again. Bagels can be an enormous power for good or for evil. It is up to us to decide how we will use them.

It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.

The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it.

Power doesn't corrupt. It's neutral. Someone always wants to corrupt power. It's the way a shotgun is not a deadly weapon until someone chooses to use it irrationally.