Quotes About Ethics

An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

It was a profession that seemed to fuse compassion and brutality, without having to reveal which was the dominant impulse, as long as both were accompanied by a high degree of precision.

Sin is not rational.

Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all.

I might not be human. I might be nothing more than a set of algorithms, running on a spacesuit with a corpse inside it. But I'm not a monster.

No one is to practise or aspire after virtue or perfection upon a motive of greatness, or of being exalted by it. This would be to fall into the snare of pride, which is to be feared under the cloak of sanctity itself.

Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.

It requires conducive social conditions, rather than monstrous people, to produce heinous deeds.

What is immoral to do is immoral to threaten.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and ''historical tasks'' is an actual or potential assassin.

Integrity has no need of rules.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.