Quotes About Ethics

I try to do the right thing. Even though everybody hates us and nobody helps us and nobody thanks us afterward. I think doing the right thing is an end in itself. It has to be, really, doesn't it?

Three men dead, two people injured, and a civilian traumatized by having to kill a man. The department is probably facing tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements. Tell me why I shouldn't walk out of here with somebody's badge in my pocket for this?

Christianity has been a boon to mankind . . . (and) has had a beneficent effect upon the human race. . . . Most people today who live in an ostensibly Christian environment with Christian ethics do not realize how much we owe Jesus of Nazareth. . . . What goodness and mercy there is in this world has come in large measure from him. D. James Kennedy, Christian

You said yourself they didn't hurt your girl." Waiting, Davy asked, "How many times does a dog have to bite before you put him down?

They only throw clean ones

O calvinismo não ensina uma ética de autoconfiança, como ensina nossa ética moderna do trabalho. É, ao contrário, uma ética da graça: quaisquer recompensas tangíveis advindas do trabalho são o dom da graça de Deus.

But I must say, if you could vulgarize what Nietzsche says you [would] arrive at what is going on all the time in the social sciences: the destruction of the whole, of every possibility of distinguishing responsibly between high and low, good and bad.

Todo ser humano y toda sociedad es lo que es en virtud de su máxima aspiración. La ciudad, si es sana, aspira no a las leyes que puede deshacer del mismo modo en que las hizo, sino a las leyes no escritas, la ley divina, los dioses de la ciudad. La ciudad debe trascenderse a sí misma. ...El factor más importante concierne a lo que trasciende la ciudad o que es más grande que la ciudad; no concierne a cosas que están simplemente subordinadas a la ciudad.

The final allegation of the accuser states that Socrates made a mischievous use of certain passages in the most highly reputed poets, interpreting, for example, a line from Hesiod to mean that one should abstain from no unjust or shameful deed but do even such things for the sake of gain. Xenophon's response speaks of Socrates' standard as the beneficial or the good; it says nothing about his views on the noble and just.

The Republic is based on the assumption that there is a strict parallelism between the city and the soul.

Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man's end—had become that center or origin.

Glaukon makes the issue manifest by comparing the perfectly unjust man to the perfect artisan, whereas he conceives of the perfectly just man as a simple man who has no quality other than justice.

Polemarchos no longer maintains that telling the truth is essential to justice. Without knowing it, he thus lays down one of the principles of the Republic. As appears later in the work, in a well-ordered society it is necessary that one tell untruths of a certain kind to children and even to the adult subjects.

In quest'epoca in cui tutto è ritenuto lecito purché sia fatto in piena libertà, e in cui il corpo è considerato un semplice strumento della volontà razionale e autonoma, la repulsione potrebbe essere l'unica voce rimasta in difesa del nucleo centrale della nostra umanità. Le anime che hanno dimenticato come si fa a rabbrividire sono superficiali.

E soprattutto, non dobbiamo ingannare noi stessi: non dobbiamo mai cercare di alleviare le nostre frustrazioni e amarezze per una morte che tarda ad arrivare illudendoci di uccidere qualcuno per difendere la sua dignità.

Nessun amante dell'umanità può rallegrarsi di un futuro postumano.

Le persone che riescono a tenere tra le mani una vita nascente con freddezza e senza timore reverenziale hanno ucciso qualcosa nella propria anima.

I sostenitori dell'eutanasia non sanno cosa sia la dignità umana e, nella migliore delle ipotesi, la confondono con la compassione.

Poiché non conosciamo davvero la loro vita interiore - cosa provano e percepiscono - corriamo il rischio di privarle della loro dignità trattandole come se non ne avessero. Il solo fatto che noi non vorremmo mai essere al loro posto non significa che in loro non sia rimasto niente che meriti rispetto.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of these civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last because people treat each other the way they ought to.

Polish prisoner Dr. Wladislaw Dering performed castrations and ovariectomies ordered by his German masters as part of their insane program to find a way to sterilize the entire Jewish race.