Quotes About Ethics

Lo que se hace por amor se hace siempre más allá del bien y del mal. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Más allá del bien y del mal

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires. THE PRINCE, Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527

Judge people by their actions.

Woe unto the statesman," he said, "who makes war without a reason that will still be valid when the war is over!

If people were rational and morally superior, the world would be suffused with goodness and peace. We know, however, the reality, and so some people, perhaps all of us, are merely deceiving ourselves.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires. THE PRINCE, Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527 LAW 1 NEVER OUTSHINE THE MASTER JUDGMENT Always make those above you feel comfortably superior.

There was a time, in fact, I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. Of course, it was, under the law of all civilized peoples, a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding fire arms to bare knuckles, made it a legally innocent act?

Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.

But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, "the State", which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.

You cant build on a mass grave. Human beings are better than that - we have to be better than that - I do believe, don't you? Charlie McGuire, Fatherland

La ley es tan cara! -comentó Clodio con una sonrisa-. El pobre Catilina ha tenido que vender las reliquias de la familia para poder estar seguro de la justicia. Realmente, es un escándalo. No sé cómo se las arregla la gente.

No one who follows their conscience ever does wrong, Your Eminence. The consequences may not turn out as we intend; it may prove in time that we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong. The only guide to a person's actions can ever be their conscience, for it is in our conscience that we most clearly hear the voice of God.

Learned minds can still believe wicked things, especially when their own interests are at stake.

The trouble with Lucious, he said, putting his feet up on the desk after this cousin has gone, is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

The trouble with Lucius," he said, putting his feet up on the desk after his cousin had gone, "is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

No one who follows their conscience ever does wrong. - Cardinal Vincent Benitez

From the subjective perspective, he may seem cruel, even wicked. But the glory of the man is to be found in the objective perspective.

Cosa si può fare, disse, se si dedica la vita a smascherare i criminali, e a poco a poco ci si accorge che i veri criminali sono quelli per cui si lavora? Cosa si può fare quando tutti ti dicono di non preoccuparti perché tanto non ci puoi fare niente ed è successo molto tempo fa? Adesso Charlie lo guardava in un modo diverso. Immagino che si perda la ragione. Oppure può succedere di peggio. La si può trovare.

Always very pious, these crooked accountants,' observed Cicero.)

So Church and state should be separate?' 'It would be best for both.' 'Then surely we would arrive at a place where the Church would have morals without power, and the state would have power without morality. That is exactly what led the ancients to disaster.

that virtue is sufficient for happiness, that nothing except virtue is good, and that the emotions are not to be trusted—

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.