Quotes About Ethics

Property left to a child may soon be lost; but the inheritance of virtue--a good name an unblemished reputation--will abide forever. If those who are toiling for wealth to leave their children, would but take half the pains to secure for them virtuous habits, how much more serviceable would they be. The largest property may be wrested from a child, but virtue will stand by him to the last.

We are agreed that the son shall not be disgraced even by the crime of the father, much less by the crime of a more distant relative. It

There is no injunction, no "ought" in political economy at all. It

The men who have not done their duty in this world never can be equal to those who have done their duty more or less well. If

The law of the conservation of energy is not simply a law of physics; it is a law of the whole moral universe, and

Aristocrats have always had their class vices and their class virtues. They have always been, as a class, chargeable with licentiousness and gambling. They have, however, as a class, despised lying and stealing. They

That there is a code and standard of mercantile honor which is quite as pure and grand as any military code, is beyond question, but it has never yet been established and defined by long usage and the concurrent support of a large and influential society. The

Vice is its own curse. If we let nature alone, she cures vice by the most frightful penalties.

A free man in a free democracy has no duty whatever toward other men of the same rank and standing, except respect, courtesy, and good-will. We

that rights and duties should be in equilibrium. A

It's simple. If your life is more important than your principles, you sacrifice your principles. If your principles are more important than your life, you sacrifice your life.

We are grown debauched in our judgments, and corrupt in our principles; no wonder then if carnal in our joys.

And so when thou art tempted to any sin, look not on it as a single sin, but as having all other sins in its belly.

Faith and a good conscience are hope's two wings.

A false heart yields when sin comes with a bribe in its hand.

In the end, it comes down, as it always comes down, to each individual human being doing what he—or she—must to live with himself/herself.

The I.B.M. machine has no ethic of its own; what it does is enable one or two people to do the computing work that formerly required many more people. If people often use it stupidly, it's their stupidity, not the machine's, and a return to the abacus would not exorcise the failing. People can be treated as drudges just as effectively without modern machines.

really believed what he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties . . . but right through every human heart" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–56 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973]).

Let's not be afraid to speak the common sense truth: you can't have high standards without good discipline.

I don't think my principles change. I think the way in which you apply those principles to modern society changes.

When the Lord Chancellor violates the trust of his great office of state to solicit party donations from people whose careers he can control, and then says I'm not sorry, and I'd do it again no wonder the public think that power has gone to their heads.

It is the mission of the next Conservative Government to build the Responsible Society.

Where defining foreign policy as 'ethical' went wrong was that it implied that all decisions would be exclusive in every respect of any dealings with unethical regimes.

Three parts of the Noble Eightfold Path fall within the training of s?la: right speech, right action, and right livelihood.