Quotes About Ethics

laws are made by human beings and human beings are not infallible. We make laws for all kinds of reasons, and not always the right ones. One of the most powerful motivations for the enactment of legislation is fear, and when you act out of fear, you risk becoming exactly the kind of monster you're trying to bar the door against. I

When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

When your corporate motto is "Making friends is our business," it forgives a lot of sins.

If we do something in the public interest which at the same time is profitable to the company, then this is, indeed, very good business," he said.

possible topics around which the currents of speech may flow: Death and the danger of death: violence, fighting, sickness, fear, dreams, premonitions and communication with the dead. Sex and relations between the sexes: dating, courtship, proposals, marriage, breaking off relationships, affairs, intermarriage. Moral indignation: assignment and rejection of blame, unfairness, injustice, gossip, violations of social norms.

That the possession of great power necessarily implies great responsibility.

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

The truth is, the best win-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

The truth is, the best won-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy.

liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

He was just innocent. With the best intentions, he smashed people's lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That

actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—"the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he's making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists.

For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

How would you explain the fact that atheists just know that harming an innocent human being is wrong, and can live good lives, without believing that God is the ultimate source of values and duties? To repeat: Belief in God is not necessary for objective morality; God is.

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: "If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.

The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist.

Dostoyevsky said, "All things are permitted." But man cannot live this way. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

There is no possible line of conduct which has at some time and place been condemned, and which has not at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.