Quotes About Ethics

This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue. It affects the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of Left vs. Right; it is a question of right vs. wrong. Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours.

Abraham Lincoln, said in 1838, when he and the United States were both very young, "Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all materials for our future support and defence. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation.

A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.

Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others.

Uma pessoa nunca é boa ou ruim per se, o que significa que amá-las ou odiá-las tem necessariamente em sua base um elemento subjetivo e talvez ilusionista.

The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by — rather than merely of how we want things to look.

Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person.

We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports.

Tupi men were allowed to take more than one wife, and were said to be devoted to them all. 'Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love

The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them.

Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals..

the saddest of fates - to be good and yet judged evil

falsifications may occasionally need to be committed in the service of a goal higher still than accuracy:

I know what's required. It's perfectly simple: Justice.

Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822)

may the day never come when patients are referred to or thought of as customers. The word patient means a sufferer and when someone comes to the doctor they are coming not because they want to buy something but because they want help. Structure and restructure the Health Service how you will doctors are not shopkeepers, patients are not customers and medicine is not a product.

There is no such thing as a necessary evil.

our first responsibility is to remove the weeds from our own garden. We must take the high road ourselves before exhorting others to do so.

You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them killing each other for a percentage.

To be angered by evil is to partake of it, stupid. - Phrases of Import and Salvation, Chapter IX, The Book of Universal Truths and Other Humorous Anecdotes