Quotes About Ethics

Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.

He did bad things. Even though he thought he was the hero.

Even at the end he couldn't be anything but bad. There would be no rehabilitation for him, no redemption. Some people are just bad forever.

There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the crimes he committed, Barbra thought, except that when he was caught, he was never held accountable, and even that was no big surprise.)

Indeed, the same millisecond of time can give birth to acts both poisonous and regenerative, both craven and noble, both trivial and momentous, as well as all gradations between.

One gift, one time--that's bribery. Lots of gifts over a long time--that's politics.''-- Roland Vanatua, from The Coup

Ultimately, the Buddhist teachings say, misfortune happens less often to those whose motives are pure.

Everything is permitted in a fight with the devil.

Arn at once agreed that this must be abominable in God's eyes, and he added that everything must be done to right this wrong.

People — some good, some bad, but in the long run we come out even.

Some persons like to give others lightning and storm for their own profit, while there are also people that like the sun see shining for every one, without thinking. Jan Jansen

For one thing, telling a lie is like eating peanuts. One leads to another. In no time at all, you've gone through a bagful." He rinsed the razor under the tap. "Worst of all, you become a slave to something that isn't real.

Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at. Goethe

He looked confused. "Don't all of you carry guns?" "Yes," I said. "But we're prepared to shoot people. Can you shoot someone?" His eyes widened. "God, no! I'm vegan." "Eating them is optional," Gertie said.

All the law does is keep the honest people from doing illegal things.

Honor is earned, not given,

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

... social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty ...

To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens.

The identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is as though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and jostle of the crowd.

We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory.

We all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have "arrived" when in reality we have not yet started.

The lessons of great men are lost unless they reinforce upon our minds the highest demands which we make upon ourselves ... they are lost unless they drive our sluggish wills forward in the direction of their highest ideals.