Quotes About Ethics

In his documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore quotes a well-known twentieth-century American journalist, Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

I keep a box in which I store his artwork and writings, like his response to an assignment in which he has been asked if you should always try your best. "I don't think you should always try your best all the time," he writes, "because, let's say a drug atick asks you for drugs you should not try your best to find him some drugs." Another assignment that goes into the box is

Love cannot exist for long without the dimension of justice.

There are three choices in this life: be good, get good, or give up.

Religion has no positive value.

If the Bible and other holy books were at all reliable sources of morality, good and bad religious people wouldn't both be able to point to their holy books as guidance and inspiration to support their positions.

Every priest who hears confessions is, by definition, an accessory to ever crime he hears about and does not report to the authorities.

Religion is a giant used car, and preachers have proverbial quotas.

A man got to have a code. --The Wire

When doing the heroic thing, the right thing, conflicts with your personal power, and you choose the right thing over the personal power thing, you have begun to understand what Agape is. It's thankless, it's difficult, yet it's what the greatest songs are sung of.

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans.

"Whatever is not nailed down is mine." This is the motto of the exploiter. "Whatever can be pried loose is not nailed down." This is the second maxim in a country where people are rich, caring little in their present prosperity what shall become of the future.

There is no real excellence in all this world that can be separated from the right living.

But the main reason you should read this is that I don't see why I should have to know all these terrible, terrible things and you should get off scot free.

This is one of the great charms of Poirot's investigations, for they reveal a world where manners and morals are quite different from today. There are no overt and unnecessary sex scenes, no alcoholic, haunted detectives in Poirot's world. He lives in a simpler, some would say more human, era: a lost England, seen through the admiring eyes of this foreigner, this little Belgian detective.

A balance between sustainable ecology and sustainable human life, on the one hand, and the unfettered drive for profit, on the other, is just an oxymoron.

Limbic capitalism refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments and criminal organizations, encourage excessive consumption and addiction.

As the philosopher Baroness Onora O'Neill has said, 'If we are to place or refuse trust we need either unmediated evidence of others

As the philosopher Baroness Onora O'Neill has said, 'If we are to place or refuse trust we need either unmediated evidence of others' honesty, competence or reliability or mediated evidence that can be checked.

Alberta thought for a moment, and took a live mouse out of her pocket by its tail before dropping it into Wagner's mouth. The bird wolfed the unfortunate creature whole.

The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.

Honesty needs no approval.

No one forced us to dope, but in the end, you were either in or out: you couldn't survive in the sport without doing it.

It's easy to be a lame nigga, it's harder to be a real one…