Quotes About Ethics

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

This industry is in a hurry to gain solid results. They expect a hero or a heroine to get intimate on the first day of meeting for the good of the film, which is against my temperament. I draw a line, which the industry doesn't like.

An actor has no more right to be temperamental than a bank clerk.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

Upon the principles of reason, the good of many is preferable to the good of a few or of one; a lasting good is to be preferred before a temporary, the public before the private.

Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part - a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part - watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they're safe in the bleachers. That's why it works, Carter, because we're all bastards.

Some of us find our way with a single light to guide us; others lose themselves even when the star field is as sharp as a neon ceiling. Ethics may not be situational, but feelings are. We learn to adjust, and, over time, the stars we use to guide ourselves come to reside within rather than without.

Here's the bottom line: The secret world of intelligence--at least in the United States of America--represents everything wrong with the government, the industrial era, our financial-economic system, and our ethics.

I will say that again in a different way: the persistent unethical and ignorant emphasis on secrecy and on making decisions for partisan advantage or to pay off campaign contributors and select insiders is not sustainable. We the People have an opportunity to embrace this manifesto of Open-Source Everything and bury 'rule of secrecy.' This is why I am optimistic about the future.

I don't worry about artificial intelligence. I worry about artificial stupidity.

It is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongfully convicted.

Never take anything that doesn't belong to you or that you haven't earned," he said, sliding into the car. "You never know who you're stealing from, and what that money means to them.

Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

was like trying to find an honest man in Congress.

Es ist besser, wenn zehn Schuldige davonkommen, als dass ein Unschuldiger verfolgt wird.‹«

They'd had conversations about Sloane's job, defending clients to the best of his abilities no matter his personal feelings about their innocence or guilt.

I hope you make those decisions because you feel they are the right thing to do, not because of peer pressure or because you're trying to fit in.

Injustice was not built of stone and mortar, or of metal. It was built of greed, inhumanity, and man's thirst for power.