Quotes About Ethics

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

To be without silver is better than to be without honor.

Why do we hunger so for vicious things? Our wishes bend the statues of the gods.

Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.

As he puts it, "Waitresses and card dealers are paid minimum wage in anticipation of their income being supplemented by tips, so if one doesn't tip them, one is, in effect, robbing them of their livelihood. Public officials, on the other hand, are expected to live within their salaries, so any effort on their part to obtain additional earnings for the simple performance of their duties is extortion at its worst and should be a jailable offense!

There are rights that you may lose without losing your honour; what makes you lose your honour is not to fight them.

I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.

Of all the charges which have been leveled against me," he is quoted as saying in the Nuremberg Interviews, "the so-called looting of art treasures by me has caused me the most anguish.

George Stout saw through their acts. "I am sick of all schemers," he wrote, "of all the vain crawling toads who now edge into positions of advantage and look for selfish gain or selfish glory from all this suffering."13

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.

The tactics used by the English in their warfare with the Indians crossed the foggy dividing line between strategic deception and outright immorality.

Russell-Einstein Manifesto. Published in London on July 9, 1955,

This whole idea—rules of war—was absurd, she thought. Men went about killing each other in the most ingenious ways they could imagine, and on a scale never before seen, but at the same time, they insisted on making up rules of engagement to preserve a facade of civilization and morality. They were like children playing a game, but one with horrendous consequences.

Men went about killing each other in the most ingenious ways they could imagine, and on a scale never before seen, but at the same time, they insisted on making up rules of engagement to preserve a facade of civilization and morality. They were like children playing a game, but one with horrendous consequences.

If only there were a way, he thought, that every living creature could survive without doing injury to any other. The world had been constructed along bloody lines, of that there was no doubt, and it remained a puzzle at least as baffling as the unified field theory he had been seeking so long.

only there were a way, he thought, that every living creature could survive without doing injury to any other. The world had been constructed along bloody lines, of that there was no doubt, and it remained a puzzle at least as baffling as the unified field theory he had been seeking so long.

Men went about killing each other in the most ingenious ways they could imagine, and on a scale never before seen, but at the same time, they insisted on making up rules of engagement to preserve a facade of civilization and morality.

The clash was unsatisfactory to everybody. Therefore, the pragmatist claimed, we must reach a livable compromise. This approach puts the pragmatist on the side of the aggressor, though they don't advocate aggression. As a criticism of pragmatism, you can say that it is totally amoral, and every amoral system is on the side of the immoral. But the pragmatist is impersonal about force. Someone wants to bash your skull in, reach a livable compromise: tell him to break one leg. [NFW 69]