Quotes About Ethics

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

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.

For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men.

L'espèce humaine mourra de méchanceté.

Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It's not hard. Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity.

All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

A man's moral worth is not measured by what his religious beliefs are but rather by what emotional impulses he has received from Nature during his lifetime.

Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.