Quotes About Ethics

Concept-work as I conceive it demands "mobile thought," Foucault's term, in advocating an "ethics of discomfort.

I'm not saying you have to be vegan," Jordan says, perhaps picking up on his father's melancholy. "If you want to continue to make animals suffer unnecessarily, be my guest.

Meaning bad isn't the issue. Meaning you do what you do. Not without consequences for other people, of course, sometimes very grave ones. But it's not very helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves. They don't define you as much as you define them

All human life must be regarded as sacred, or one's own may be endangered as well.

And is it possible,' said Emily, as these recollections returned—'is it possible, that a mind, so susceptible of whatever is grand and beautiful, could stoop to low pursuits, and be subdued by frivolous temptations?

That any human being should willingly afflict a fellow being who had never injured, or even offended him; that, unswayed by passion, he should deliberately become the means of torturing him, appeared to Vivaldi nearly incredible!

Though splendour may grace happiness, virtue only can bestow it.

Can this be in human nature! — Can such horrible perversion of right be permitted! Can man, who calls himself endowed with reason, and immeasurably superior to every other created being, argue himself into the commission of such horrible folly, such inveterate cruelty, as exceeds all the acts of the most irrational and ferocious brute.

There can be no degradation, my Lord, where there is no vice," replied Vivaldi; "and there are instances, pardon me, my Lord, there are some few instances in which it is virtuous to disobey.

How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty!

Let me say the good are often punished unfairly.

I've learned that doing what you think is right doesn't always make you feel good. For another, I've learned that sometimes you just have to keep on going when you want to do nothing but drop. And that just doing the everyday things, like keeping a shop running or getting up every morning, will keep the work going until things can straighten out again. And doing those things right every day soon becomes more important than the more pressing issues of the time.

Doing good doesn't always make you feel good. I don't care what they tell you in church.

Conscience doth make cowards of us all," but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another's pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living in a world with other human beings.

I asked him if there was any effective treatment for people like Bundy. "He paused for a moment and said, 'Only a sledgehammer between the eyes.

in Socrates' words, he had committed sin by failing to know what was false and what was true.

Dostoyevsky knew a lot but not everything. He, for instance, thought that if you kill a human you'll turn into Raskolnikov. But we know now that one can kill five - ten, one hundred people - and go to the theatre in the evening.

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe and just side of a question is the generous and merciful side.

To shoot up a district of women, children, prams and goldfish otherwise, to run them through with swords much as one might like to, would not look good, would look grave, sexist, unbalanced, not only in the glare of the critical side of the home media, but also in the eyes of the international media

The proper function of any school is to train character, and all its studies are of importance only as means by which this end can be attained.

He'd misjudged the powerful effect of his beloved's nearness. Keeping his hands to himself had been simple when Serena treated him as a vague acquaintance. When he held her in his arms, control became impossible. He'd stepped away, the only thing he could do to preserve honor. His and hers.

He was trying to get me to come inside and away from the scene, but I said, "No." I said, "We have to stay here and watch because this is wrong.

They didn't need as many external rules as we did because they had internalised the standards of decency.

wouldn't go to war