Quotes About Ethics

Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the streaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say 'Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent.

Man resembles no carnivorous animal.

He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

There are many fine ideals which are not realisable, and yet we do not refrain from teaching them.

Freedom is a clear conscience.

I understood and agreed that from a feminist perspective working in a strip club was extremely problematic, but I was saving money to travel and making more in one night than most of my friends made in a week. Plus, it was interesting.

George Orwell has written that "political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."1

Blowing up a few buildings is a lot better than an exploding planet, but people aren't very interested in simple arithmetic when there's blame to assign.

We must work the system without allowing the system to corrupt us.

Let them look upon virtue and pine because they have lost her.

and low-life cable network producers, who have never had a thought in their heads that did not come from something else they saw on cable television, are so unthreatened by me that they feel safe stealing my stuff and claiming to have had sudden strokes of genius.

It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation.

Do you still believe in God, Rabbi?", she said at last. His face looked drained and pale. He shook his head from side to side. "I believe in sin," he said and finished his wine. I believe in evil.

If you've had the right kind of education, it's amazing how many things you can find to feel guilty about.

A successful leader must lead by example.

Washington could not have called on his men to be such authentic Christians, if he was not trying to be such a Christian as well.

To have the ability to destroy all and not to do it was one of the hard tests humanity passed -- but only just -- in the middle of the twentieth century.

You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.

Hunting, works for conservation like slavery works for economic growth. A guaranteed but morally awful way to achieve a goal.

Great leaders not only treat people with respect and dignity, they hold others accountable for doing the same.

paraphrasing it. Secondly, his approach to literature is overwhelmingly moral; its purpose is to teach us about life, to transmit humane

The world of the sorcerer's apprentice – a world without an 'off' switch? Is that the world we inhabit?

We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength," Truman declared, "that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.