Quotes About Ethics

Breathtakingly generous in his philanthropy, Rockefeller could also be stingy—appallingly so.

For Rockefeller, it was dogma that prices should reflect true market values, not the buyer's ability to pay, and nothing upset him more than the notion that a rich man should pay a premium on his hard-earned wealth.

I believe it my duty to a good many people who have been blackmailed by doctors to stand a trial.

It was too easy to camouflage selfish impulses by invoking a higher cause as the real cause.

Mr. Rockefeller, you are no different from any other citizen before the law, and if I were you, I would appear.

That he would give $100,000 one minute to charity and turn around and haggle over the price of a ton of coal.

Never under any circumstances do an action which could be called in question if known to the world.

By recruiting subordinates who had never worked at Standard Oil, he had a chance for a fresh start, where he could make his behavior, for the first time, as ethical as his rhetoric.

To give away the Rockefeller fortune with a clear conscience, he had to convince himself that it had been earned fairly.

Led by Gates, these subordinates guaranteed that the Rockefeller millions were donated or invested scrupulously.

Junior's presence at 26 Broadway further ensured that father would behave more ethically than in the past.

What makes him so problematic—and why he continues to inspire such ambivalent reactions—is that his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad.

By 1907, however, they had exploited enough legal loopholes to become highly speculative.

What makes Flagler's ethics consequential for Rockefeller's career was that he was the mastermind of many negotiations with the railroads—the single most controversial aspect of Standard Oil history.

In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment.

All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations and act only from motives of pure patriotism, and for the general good of the public has been destroyed. An inside view proves too truly very much the reverse. —ULYSSES S. GRANT to WILLIAM T. SHERMAN, September 18, 1867

They don't subscribe to our sense of morality; they don't believe in an afterlife; they don't believe in a God or religion. And the only morality they recognize, therefore, is what will advance the cause or socialism.

We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life--the unborn--without diminishing the value of all human life.

America will never be whole as long as the right to life granted by our Creator is denied to the unborn.

Morality in the long run aligned with strategy.

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation, because your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are."1

La guerra es una porquería no sólo derriba casas, sino también los principios más elevados.

En lo que se divide de verdad la humanidad es entre buena y mala gente. Entre las personas que son capaces de ponerse en el lugar de los otros y sufrir con ellos y alegrarse con ellos, y los hijos de puta que sólo buscan su propio beneficio, que sólo saben mirarse la barriga. Esos que son capaces de vender a su madre, ya me entiendes" - 'La buena suerte' de Rosa Montero

Nadie se resignaba ya a ser en parte bueno y en parte malo, como siempre habían sido, sino que, enardecidos por la grandilocuencia de sus propias mentiras todos querían hacerse pasar por puros y perfectos.