Quotes About Ethics

My dad actually was a wonderful person, and also happened to be a hunter and fisherman. And my brothers and I never would eat meat our whole lives. We just wouldn't eat it. We would refuse it. Of course, in that day and age you kind of got forced to eat it. But the minute we all became teenagers, we foreswore it.

My perspective is that, when you're a kid, if your audience is a group of children or teenagers, you do have some level of social responsibility. I feel that.

Good people can make bad decisions and bad people can be redeemable and that is an important message for teenagers.

Kids aren't political, but around 10 years old, they are beginning to develop the moral grounding that might later, in their teens, develop into their first real political perspectives.

I cut my teeth on religious liberty issues.

During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson.

Science, as illustrated by the printing press, the telegraph, the railway, is a double-edged sword. At the same moment that it puts an enormous power in the hands of the good man, it also offers an equal advantage to the evil disposed.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

Once I was standing in line to buy a telephone and Senator Wirth was in line with me. The next day the New York Times reported that we'd both purchased telephones and what price we'd paid!

When the 'New York Times' revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

A street criminal can steal only what he can carry, but with a stroke of a pen, the dialing of a telephone or the pushing of a computer key, the white collar criminal can and does steal billions.

Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and '80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.

Most of us will agree that my former medium, television news, has been reduced to tawdry entertainment.

I think the idea of creating a television news source that is not beholden to corporate interests is nirvana.

I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.

You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

I always tell people that you should only hire people to be on your team if you would work for them.

And let me tell you, you boys of America, that there is no higher inspiration to any man to be a good man, a good citizen, and a good son, brother, or father, than the knowledge that you come from honest blood.

And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role.

Don't speak evil of someone if you don't know for certain, and if you do know ask yourself, why am I telling it?

Some companies use off-balance-sheet partnerships to raise money or to buy assets without ever telling their shareholders in their financial statements.

A news organization has a much different responsibility. I might not be telling you the whole story. I might not be telling you a story in a manner that is properly sophisticated.