Quotes About Ethics

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith—still the religion's focal personage—married at least thirty-three women, and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

Historian D. Michael Quinn refers to the Saints' bald-faced dissembling as "theocratic ethics." The Mormons called it "Lying for the Lord."*

Uncle Rulon has married an estimated seventy-five women with whom he has fathered at least sixty-five children; several of his wives were given to him in marriage when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties.

All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith.

Police and prosecutors are morally and professionally obligated to make every effort to identify specious rape reports, safeguard the civil rights of rape suspects, and prevent the falsely accused from being convicted. At the same time, however, police and prosecutors are obligated to do everything in their power to identify individuals who have committed rape and ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. These two objectives are not mutually exclusive.

Podía intentar explicar que se regía por un código de orden superior; argumentar que, como moderno seguidor de las ideas de Henry David Thoreau, había adoptado como evangelio el ensayo titulado Sobre el deber de la desobediencia civil y consideraba que no someterse a unas leyes opresivas e injustas era una obligación moral.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible account with the ideal and the principled.

You have to appeal to people's best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.

no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule—one common to the world's religious and moral traditions—has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln's own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," he once wrote. "This expresses my idea of democracy.

Conscience and character were not incidental to human affairs, but instrumental.

In a democracy, the pursuit of power for power's sake, devoid of devotion to equal justice and fair play, is tempting but destructive

The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good.

As Thoreau wrote in his 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience," "Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

Watergate is a shabby, tawdry business that demeans the Presidency. Am I failing to lead by not stating that?

When the word moderation becomes a dirty word we have some soul searching to do.

We know instinctively," Jane Addams wrote, "that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.

Don't join the book burners," he said. "Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

He exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities; to him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational

what I believe true dignity consists, that is to say, honesty, propriety of conduct, and honest independence.