Quotes About Ethics

In Hinduism and Buddhism, dharma has various connotations, but generally it means cheerfully fulfilling your moral and ethical duty. Doing the right thing.

You want to protect the innocent. Let me tell you, God isn't just in the rabbits. He's also in the foxes. So your little act of kindness deprived God of a meal.

Kings were no better than murderers, the only difference being that they had a legal monopoly on killing.

karma implies the action of conscious choice-making.

For example, suppose that the pain of a nose-breaking punch is equivalent to the pain of six months in jail. If we can deter one in nine such punches with the threat of three months' imprisonment, and catch half the offenders, we will wind up imposing four three-month sentences to deter one punch—a bad bargain from the utilitarian point of view.

What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?

Humanomics doesn't give up on science. On the contrary, it yields the best scientific explanation of how we got rich, 1800 to the present, and how the whole world soon will, and it gives us, too, a reason to be good.

That businesspeople buy low and sell high in a particularly alert and advantageous way does not make them bad unless all trading is bad, unless when you yourself shop prudently you are bad, unless any tall poppy needs to be cut down, unless we wish to run our ethical lives on the sin of envy.

As an Italian liberal, and anti-fascist, Benedetto Croce, put it in 1928, "Ethical liberalism abhors authoritarian regulation of the economic process [equally from the left as from the right, from socialism as from fascism], because it considers it a humbling of the inventive faculties of man."3 In

Commerce works better than theft.

The Harvard philosopher John Rawls articulated what he called the Difference Principle: if the entrepreneurship of a rich person made the poorest better off, then the higher income of the rich entrepreneur was justified.7 It makes a good deal of ethical sense. Equality does not.

Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions.

Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

We need knew knights, but without swords.

If thou suffer injustice, console thyself; the true unhappiness is in doing it.

Probably all laws are useless, for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.

He who confers a favor should at once forget it, if he is not to show a sordid ungenerous spirit. To remind a man of a kindness conferred and to talk of it, is little different from reproach.

He who receives a favour must retain a recollection of it for all time to come; but he who confers should at once forget it, if he is not to show a sordid and ungenerous spirit. To remind a man of a kindness conferred on him, and to talk of it, is little different from a reproach.

The man who has received a benefit ought always to remember it, but he who has granted it ought to forget the fact at once.

What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice.

You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit.

Virtue begins with understanding and is fulfilled by courage.

Social confusion has now reached a point at which the pursuit of immorality turns out to be more exhausting than compliance with the old moral codes.

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.