Quotes About Ethics

Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

No evil is intolerable but a guilty conscience.

The home is the chief school of human virtues.

The great hope of society is in individual character.

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished; the others can only be hurt.

What is morally wrong cannot be politically right.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judeo-Christianity in the public square.

All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

The larger lesson is that technological development does not necessarily mean civilized values ~~ we all have to remain on guard. Humans, unlike robots, have the power to choose how to behave.

Well, we've only had a certain number of executions in the last few years- whatever it was- and two of them were for the personal convenience of Truman Capote.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!

Ingratitude is a crime more despicable than revenge, which is only returning evil for evil, while ingratitude returns evil for good.

The power of self-control is one of the great qualities that differentiates man from the lower animals. He is the only animal capable of a moral struggle or a moral conquest.

To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny.

It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.

the law has neither eyes, nor ears, nor bowels of humanity; and it turns into marble the hearts of all those that are nursed in its principles.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.