Quotes About Ethics

If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.

If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.

Who you work for is more important than what you do

They'd rather have the killing continue?' 'Certainly. An occasional killing does wonders for business.' 'If the town is that way, it doesn't deserve to live.' 'A perceptive man your father was, naming you Judgement.

I don't much like it when people commit unsavory acts and try to shift the blame onto me.

Scholarship that is indifferent to human suffering is immoral.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

Our country needs more tough critics like you who don't just swallow the hype like everyone else. So many writers might as well be on the payroll — be it entertainment industry or government.

Eventually, most of us figure out that it's people, not nature, who create morality, values, ethics- and even the idea that nature itself is worth preserving. We will live wisely- preserving water, air and everything else intrinsic to the equations we're only beginning to understand- or we won't, in which case nature will fill the vacuum we leave. She is exquisite and utterly indefferent.

You are right on target when you say that mad scientists have a total disregard for the wellbeing of others. We don't want to spread evil we just see no point in bothering to spread good.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.

When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal.

When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.

The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.

If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines

With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of man.

The hero can never be a relativist.

Since both knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards…

Gentlemen did not always live up to their ideal, but the existence of an ideal is a matter of supreme importance.

I don't want to stockpile tuna fish and bullets. That's not the world I want to live in.