Quotes About Ethics

My master Thomas More would give anything to anyone. Some say that's good and some say that's bad, but I say he can't help it and that's bad... because some day someone's going to ask him for something that he wants to keep; and he'll be out of practice.

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons . . . And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, . . . 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 . . . do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I would give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.

I don't pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.

Being told by way of aggravation, that he had eaten half a dozen plumbs, Nay truly, sister, (answers he simply to her) I have eaten half a score. So perfect an enemy was he to a lie, that he had rather accuse himself of another fault, than be suspected to be guilty of that.

The decision as to whether to risk one's actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is." from The structure of desire and recognition

Every lie is two lies — the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it.

You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.

Every day ask yourself, "What would I do today if I were a better person?"

There is an ongoing battle between conscience and self-interest in which, at some point, we have to take sides.

Wall Street criminality is growing by leaps. There are no bounds.

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone's feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.

The trouble with selfish motives is that they harden into principles, and you end up sending your kids to war for them.

You must question a code of ethics that never impedes your progress.

Always telling the truth is no doubt better than always lying, although equally pathological.

I believe in animal rights, and high among them is the right to the gentle stroke of a human hand.

According to science, the universe began as a swirl of gas that, as it cooled, spun off the Ten Commandments.

If you teach your children nothing else, teach them the Golden Rule and "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey."

Man, in his sensitivity, does not give names to animals he intends to eat but goes on giving names to children he intends to send to war.

[T]he devil... seldom leads people astray anymore, finding it easier to just follow along in their footsteps.

Sometimes, to do the right thing, we must keep a promise we never made.

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.

A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.