Quotes About Ethics

Genius does not excuse evil.

Is a knife evil? Only if the wielder is evil.

Have you completely made up for all the bad things you've done? No. But you keep adding to the good things column. That's all any of us can do.

It doesn't seem right? Another part of him wondered, Since when do I worry about what's right?

Weapons are allowed. Dirty tricks are expected. But try not to kill anybody!" Tantalus smiled at us like we were all naughty children. "Any killing will result in harsh punishment. No s'mores at the campfire for a week! Now ready your chariots!

A little secret, Magnus. There is no good and evil. There's only capable and incapable. I am capable.

I had a hard time looking at Freya without staring. There really wasn't anything safe to focus on – her eyes, her lips, her belly button. I silently scolded myself, This is Blitzen's mom! This is my aunt! I decided to focus on her left eyebrow. There was nothing entrancing about a left eyebrow.

We are servants of Ma'at—order and justice. We don't kill our enemies for things they might do in the future.

A surgeon would never hesitate to amputate a rotting hand, no matter how faithfully it had served its owner in the past.

Beautiful people never lie.

Young man, names are powerful things. You don't just go around using them for no reason.

God is always more interested in why we do something than in what we do. Attitudes count more than achievements.

El denominador común del liderazgo, es la integridad.

el fundamento del liderazgo es el carácter; no el carisma, ni los estudios o los talentos, sino el carácter.

None of us are immune to temptation.

eye for an eye," Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)

Louise would have removed his organs without anesthetic and given them to more worthy people.

You did not need a God (Sylvie was an unconfessed atheist) to believe in sin.

Sacrifice,' " Sylvie said, "is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.") But

The coat was forties-style, made from Canadian beaver at a time when people didn't think about whether or not it was wrong to wear fur. Although Gloria would no longer wish to wear the skin of another animal on top of her own, the way she looked at it now, the beavers were already long dead and had lived the happy, uncomplicated life of Canadian beavers before the war.

She could understand why someone might want to kill a queue jumper. If it had been up to her she would have summarily executed a great many people by now—people who dropped litter in the street, for example, they would certainly think twice about the discarded sweet wrapper if it resulted in being strung up from the nearest lamppost.

Working for the environment didn't mean Ewan was a particularly nice person. He was very self-righteous about the fact that he didn't want any part of Graham's business empire, which apparently was playing its own small part in the "global capitalist conspiracy." That didn't stop him from taking money from Graham whenever he was home.

Buying and selling, that's all people did. You could buy women, you could buy kids, you could buy anything. Western civilization had had a good run but now it had pretty much shopped itself out of existence.

Terence Smith. Graham's golem, formed from the slime at the bottom of a pond of lowlifes somewhere in the Midlands.