Quotes About Ethics

The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.

The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no motherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned the majority opinion, which included these immortal words: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler used his paper as a megaphone to promote eugenics, and universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Harvard bestowed their academic credibility to the cause.

There were people who saw the future of warfare coming from the skies. And they always knew that would mean bombing civilians. That's what it was always about, though no one would say it aloud. You see, they thought that if you killed enough civilians it would bring a quick end to any war.

I am against the death penalty.

Confronting this question takes us beyond a world where the line between good and evil is sharp and bright, into a gray confusion where navigation was soul-trying work.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

The great curse of theology and ecclesiasticisim has always been their tendency to sacrifice large interests to small: Charity to Creed, Unity to Uniformity, Fact to Tradition, Ethics to Dogma.

An alternative modernity worthy of the name would recover the mediating power of ethics and aesthetics. This would be accomplished not by a return to blind traditionalism but through the democratization of technically mediated institutions. Power

I'm sure that's okay for a magazine or a book," he went on. "But this is the SAT. You can't get away with that stuff on the SAT.

Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?

Por esta razón el hombre fue creado al comienzo como una sola persona, para enseñarles que quienquiera que destruya una vida es considerado por las Escrituras como alguien que ha destruido un mundo entero; y quienquiera que salve una es como si hubiera salvado un mundo entero.

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.

I had heard so-called "Christian" military and political leaders proposing that the U.S. bomb the dikes and dams along the Red River delta in Vietnam in order to "defeat Communism," thus potentially killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people. I began asking myself, what sort of religion would justify such arrogance and criminality?

The logic of evangelical Protestants in the 18th century led to an inescapable conclusion: If God was indeed no respecter of persons, and if all were equal in the sight of God—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, white and colored—then Christians had no business owning slaves or benefitting from their labor and suffering, and slavery itself was a crime against God.

A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral—everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief.

He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost.

Call it Westhusing's Theorem: In a democracy, the health of the military professional ethic is inversely proportional to the presence of hired auxiliaries on the battlefield. The pursuit of mammon and the values to which military professionals profess devotion are fundamentally incompatible and irreconcilable. Where profit-and-loss statements govern, devotion to duty, honor, and country inevitably takes a hit.

egregious Iraqi misbehavior

The Abu Ghraib debacle showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills.

Andrew J. Bacevich

Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.

The moment you step into a garden and begin to cultivate and prune, you become a killer.