Quotes About Ethics

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

All children are essentially criminal.

People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.

To place patients of different illnesses in the same ward is to use people to kill each other. approx quote, possibly on L Hotel Dieu in Paris.

L]e philosophe n'a jamais tué de prêtres et le prêtre a tué beaucoup de philosophes... (The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.)

A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

It is better to reveal a weakness than allow oneself be suspected of a vice.

Nikki said he got Susan pregnant when she was thirteen.' Lizzie nods and cringes and gives a little grunt. 'It's very young.' She grunts non-committally again, shrugs and takes another biscuit. 'I can't explain that you.' 'Isn't he a paedophile then?' 'Yeah, technically. But then he was still with her until she was nineteen, so then what?

Even if all philosophers do eat, some may eat more than others. This situation is called "lack of fairness". Or life.

Fame is a vapor, popularity is an accident, and money takes wings. The only thing that endures is character.

The moment that any of us begins to trade principle for approval we give up our power.

Do the right thing. Do your job and forget about everything else—and that means the press. Today's headline wraps tomorrow's garbage.

Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?

Bad judges, lousy cops, greedy lawyers, lazy prosecutors, mediocre teachers, and incompetent bureaucrats are inevitable. When they happen, they should be weeded out and sent back to school to learn something about moral courage and the Golden Rule.

The newspaper publisher who hangs around clubs or becomes a crony to sundry businessmen cannot run a good newspaper.

The death penalty is becoming a way of life in this country.

There is a tendency today to turn moral issues into amoral ones, to argue that many of the decisions and choices we make are merely personal choices that lie outside the ethical purview. For example, in the current debate about euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, some argue that this is not a moral issue but simply a matter of controlling one's life. Ethical questions need not be raised.

we must be open to the fact that in regard to some ethical judgments, our focus will be more on the wise, judicious course of action than on the absolute right course of action.

as Lewis Smedes once pointed out, "We have no ideal world in which to find out what God expects us to do; we have only this changing and broken one. . . . And obedience to unchanging commands must adjust to changing conditions."11 But that in no way implies that the moral and theological guides are themselves relativistic, sometimes binding and at other times not.

Pastoral care cannot be reduced to ethics, and ethics cannot be reduced to pastoral care. If we reduce our care to ethics, we will lack empathy, love, and understanding in applying ethical norms to people's lives; if we reduce ethics to pastoral care, we will end up with a minimalistic ethic of shallow love or humanistic care.

Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.