Quotes About Ethics

the correctness of an action was not adjudged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.

Exodus 23:8–"And thou shalt take no gift; for a gift blindeth them that have sight and perverteth the words of the righteous.

The time to react protectively is when we feel ourselves liking the practitioner more than we should under the circumstances.

Do not seek dishonest gains; dishonest

Desde que publiquei a primeira edição de O poder da persuasão, aconteceram algumas coisas que merecem

ethology—the study of animals in their natural settings.

After all, the reciprocity rule asserts that if justice is to be done, exploitation attempts should be exploited. READER

An Apple executive told The New York Times, "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.

Twenty-one of the corporations whose CEOs signed the statement paid no federal income taxes in 2018, courtesy of those lobbying efforts. One of the signers was Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO of Amazon and of its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after the statement appeared, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce—at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in two hours.

If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you'd have left is pavement.

One of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy," observed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, "is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Wall Street is a casino in which high-stakes wagers are placed within a limited number of betting houses that keep a percentage of the wins for themselves and fob off losses on others, including taxpayers.

Coca-Cola's former president William Robinson, who in 1959 told an audience at Fordham Law School that executives should not put stockholders first. They should "balance the interests of the stockholder, the community, the customer, and the employee.

We're not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We're in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations.

Personal responsibility is completely foreign to the highest echelons of the Street. Citigroup's stock fell 44 percent in 2011, but its CEO, Vikram Pandit, got at least $5.45 million on top of a retention bonus of $16.7 million. The stock of JPMorgan Chase fell 20 percent, but its CEO, Jamie Dimon, was awarded a package worth $22.9 million.

The average American is unaware of this system—the patenting of drugs from nature, the renewal of patents based on insignificant changes, the aggressive marketing of prescription drugs, bans on purchases from foreign pharmacies, payments to doctors to prescribe specific drugs, and pay-for-delay—as well as the laws and administrative decisions that undergird all of it.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.

The law is not a "light" for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. ...The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely.

Sir Thomas More: Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one. Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it? Sir Thomas More: You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.

This account of him [Thomas More] developed as I wrote: what first attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life in great variety and almost greedy quantities, who nevertheless found something in himself without which life was valueless and when that was denied him was able to grasp his death.