Quotes About Ethics

Oh, well, if it's a matter of honor," I said. "You should have said that to begin with. Not that it has anything to do with deciding what we ought to do next, but I am sure you would have felt better for saying it.

You yourself, I seem to remember, have a way of soaking up scandal broth even as you seem to have a mind for higher and nobler things. Stir yourself.

If you're going to be rude, do it for a reason and get something from it.

We have chosen a problematic name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we're all consumers now, grasping all the stuff every which way.

Cradled in this community whose currency was relational ethics, my stock in myself soared. My value depended on the glorious intangibility, the eloquence invisibility, of my just being part of the collective—and in direct response I grew spacious and happy and gentle.

According to the "Cult of True Womanhood," a popular phrase during those years, a true woman possessed four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.

was off yanking innocent fish out of an idyllic existence in some lake

Arguments for slavery weren't pragmatic or ethical discussions about the realities of slavery; they were assertions about abstract identities (The Slave, The Slave Owner, The Abolitionist) and performances of loyalty to the South. They were demagoguery.

Heartfelt conviction is not, alas, a guarantee of moral decency.

Science itself does not adjudicate on moral values. When all available facts are in, we may still face the questions "What should we do?

Certainty about one's moral stance might be soothing, but it tends to blinker us to damage we are about to cause.

What you do and what you are gradually become the same thing, and are identical when you die. And what you have done to another person becomes a part of your substance as surely as a fruit you have eaten.

Each human must invent human love, a chance that will be given to you in becoming human. And for all the atrocity they have done and will do, it is still through human love, and no other, that appetite, desire, and pleasure themselves become the source of ethics, which knowledge makes inseparable from love

And what does God ask of you?" "To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist between person and person, as flame goes from candle to candle. To know that all we can know of right or wrong is through the way our acts are revealed in the lives of other people. There is no other way to see God. It is not given to us.

One can save one's soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious state; but not always both at once.

Other major challenges include the redefinition of work as a contribution to the good of all, as opposed to merely being a matter of pure self- advancement.

The commitment to enlarged thought is morally and politically significant in that it fosters the 'ability to think without rules', to cultivate judgement and conscience capable of thinking through the purposes and consequences of our actions from different perspectives, without proceeding in automatic fashion through obedience to pre-existing social conventions.

The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate, it is immutable.

It is the business of a virtuous clergy to censure vice in every appearance of it.

Virtue will slumber. The wicked will be continually watching. Consequently, you will be undone.

A value is a rule, principle, or belief that gives meaning to your life.

All horsepower corrupts.

Unless people have a vision of something beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot transcend their self-interest.

Like a voice crying in the wilderness, we beg members of the foreign press to earn their wages honestly, and suggest that if they must lie they do so about their own countries, but not about El Salvador ." (Notice displayed on the wall of the Ministry of Defence press office, El Salvador, 1983.)