Quotes About Ethics

The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.

Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.

That which is not just is not law.

When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.

This is the final test of a gentleman: His respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.

Had I been wrong, this would still have been the honorable thing to do. I am very glad, however, to find out that I was right.

Those who forgets their friends to follow those of a higher status are truly snobs.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?

Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

product of service. Instead

We humans have the ability to see beyond our species, and that ability confers a responsibility.

People don't ever seem to relate that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

The law's not about justice. It's a system we've put in place because we can't have justice.

Everyone is equally responsible for the shit they bring into the world.

When anything and everything goes, there are no real values, no definite right and wrong.

If everyone's perspective is equally right, she warned her husband, then there is no absolute right, and everything goes. It could leave you without bearings, adrift and lost.

So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

Men wrote the Bible, but God made our consciences.

Men wrote the Bible, but God made our consciences. Does he want them to gather dust?' There