Quotes About Ethics

Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.

Sure, it's going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway.

Once we start to worry too often and too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency.

incapacity to commit oneself to any value system beyond one supplying self-serving needs usually indicates severe narcissistic pathology. The

With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half.

To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.

Politics ruins the character.

Show me an objective worthy of war and I will go along with you.

Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension. --"Wanda

Men object to the surveillance of a wife, and most justly; but they seem to forget that it is nothing compared to the unscrupulous espionage of a courtesan.

Only a dog I" Well, dogs cannot lie, or bribe, or don a surplice, or pick a lock, or go bull-baiting in sharemarkets, or preside as chairmen over public companies; we can only, if we are dishonest, run off with a bone in a most open and foolish fashion, and get instantly whipped for our pains So that there is one art at least in which men are decidedly in advance of us; and in deference to that superexcellcnce in stealing,

Nay—when will you do so much as remember that the coward who tortures an animal would murder a human being if he were not afraid of the gallows? When will you see that to teach the hand of a child to stretch out and smother the butterfly, is to teach that hand, when a man's, to steal out and strangle an enemy?

I never judge people; seemingly bad actions may have good motives, good ones may spring from base and selfish ends.

Take the dog to him, but do not bring mo back any money; I am not a thief, to take payment for honesty." "What I but he's offered the five sovs. for the dog; you've a right to it,—where is the harm?" "There may be no harm, but I would not take it. My father would have never let me accept a reward fordoing such a little simple thing, so plainly right as that.

No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.

Forbear to lay the guilt of a few on the many.

The ends justify the means.

Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.

I see and approve better things, but follow worse.

An evil life is a kind of death.

The result justifies the deed.