Quotes About Ethics

Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.

Up there the world is divided into bastards and suckers. Make your choice.

Social workers are bastards,

Aristotle also felt strongly that virtue requires action; mere noble intentions are not enough.

As a law graduate, this allowing of intention to trump outcome rings alarm bells for me. Imagine if while driving your car, intending to bring a friend to the hospital as quickly as possible, you hit and killed a child. You would not expect to tell that story to friends and have them respond, 'Great, so good of you to get your friend some help. Well done – and no matter about the child, you didn't mean to kill it.

We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe'.

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It's not necessary that the lies be particularly believable, but merely that they be erected as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided.

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

Love does not imply pacifism.

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

They expect you to act as an Angel does, when they do not even know; if their souls are going to Heaven or Hell. -MillYentei

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes.

You'll see certain Pythagorean whose belief in communism of property goes to such lengths that they pick up anything lying about unguarded, and make off with it without a qualm of conscience as if it had come to them by law.

Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long 'forgotten' set of purely imitative impressions.

We like to think of this as the conquest of bestial weaknesses by the powers of intellectual altruism, as if ethics and morality were some kind of modern invention. If this were really true, it is doubtful if we would be here today to proclaim it. If we did not carry in us the basic biological urge to co-operate with our fellow men, we would never have survived as a species.

The young profession of social work sold its expertise in detecting fraud and waste.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Be the best you can be, in the worst of circumstances, even when no one is watching.

dharma is not about justice; it is about empathy and wisdom. Dharma is not about defeating others, it is about conquering ourselves. Everybody wins in dharma.

Dharma is more about empathy than ethics, about intent rather than outcome. I follow dharma when I am concerned about your material, emotional or intellectual hunger. I follow adharma when I focus on my hunger at the cost of yours.