Quotes About Ethics

The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can't return even if it wants to.

I think it is in the interest of the people of [Serbia] that no one, not even the government, can get away with the crime, whoever the victim.

Governments are like underwear. They start smelling pretty bad if you don't change them once in a while.

We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government.

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

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

I am supposed to owe the government something like $100 million. I couldn't squeeze out a dime.

What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability.

The business of government is justice.

A just government has no need for the clergy or the church.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Virtue alone is not sufficient for the exercise of government; laws alone cannot carry themselves into practice.

Government is never so noble as when it is addressing wrongs.

In matters of government, justice means force as well as virtue.

We must never violate principles. We must never initiate violence. And we should never harm the innocent. But at some point, unless governments back off, we have to stop being nice.

I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.

Every person in a well-ordered state is fully conscious of both his responsibilities and his rights.

It's healthy for government to be a kind of moral catalyst, using the bully pulpit of high office.

The role of government is to create responsible greed to keep boundaries around what people do.

[V]irtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.