Quotes About Ethics

Had J.D. Salinger known who John Hinckley and mark David Chapman were before they bought his books or took them out of the library? Would it have mattered if he had? Had he returned the royalties he received from those purchases?

Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.

You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path.

Stealing is good, honest work, Said the theif, puffing out his chest. Well, not honest, strictly speaking, he admitted after a moment. Or actually good.

Who wants a leader who wants to be leader? And I could see his point there. I've always sort of thought we ought to keep a close eye on anyone who wants power over others.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.

When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.

In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence.

I have always considered David Hume as approaching as nearly the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.

The most sacred laws of justice are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbor.

qué otro sistema político puede ser más ruinoso y destructivo que los vicios de los hombres?

If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least . . . abstain from robbing and murdering one another.

Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it.

a man within the breast...

Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

Lawyers and attorneys, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.

Two different sets of philosophers have attempted to teach us this hardest of all the lessons of morality. One set have laboured to increase our sensibility to the interests of others; another, to diminish that to our own. The first would have us feel for others as we naturally feel for ourselves. The second would have us feel for ourselves, as we naturally feel for others.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

manner, to the selfish and original

In China, often only the practice of infanticide makes marriage and family life possible.  In all the major towns, parents annually abandon many children in the streets or drown them like unwanted puppies.  Some people even make a living out of performing infanticide contracts for money.

As J. G. Ballard pointed out, civilization is just a thin, fragile veneer over the law of the jungle: Better you than me. Better your kid than my kid.

Paradoxically, the best way to attract good work is by doing good work.