Quotes About Ethics

Child abuse isn't evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children.

We always hear about the scandals of the few, but what of the goodness of the majority?

In my view, sire, anyone who actively campaigns for public office disqualifies himself for holding any office at all!

week old infants, ward-bound juveniles with epilepsy, or those with profound retardation in his experiments. Involuntary, nontherapeutic, and dangerous experiments on children were far from unusual or dishonourable endeavours during the twentieth century. The practice was widely accepted, rarely questioned and integral to the phenomenal growth of medical research and human experimentation during World War II and the Cold War that followed.

It should be understood that doctors did not want to damage their patients—as a profession they were sworn to do no harm—but if they committed dastardly acts, they were more easily pardoned if something positive had come of the exercise. Experiments on humans were usually excused if the results of the study were substantial, the process had an element of science to it, and the physicians were correct in their expectations. 19

Even infants were used in research studies; for example, two-day-old babies were fed bismuth, a metal-like substance used in the manufacture of some pharmaceuticals, and then exposed to extensive X-rays to chart the course of different foods in their stomachs.

three associates of the William Pepper Clinical Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania used well over a hundred children under the age of eight at the St. Vincent's Home for Orphans, a Catholic orphanage in Philadelphia, for a series of diagnostic tests in which a tuberculin formula was placed in the test subjects' eyes. 23

Doctors quickly discovered that access to institutionalized populations could springboard them to lucrative contracts with drug companies and great wealth. The financial incentives became so enticing that some physicians gave up their private practices to conduct large-scale clinical trials full time. 10

Many test subjects at the dawn of the Atomic Age and throughout the decades that followed, as the public would come to learn, were children. Some were only days old; some were cognitively and physically impaired.

Bereft of legal status or protectors, institutionalized children were often the test subjects of choice for medical researchers hoping to discover a new vaccine, prove a new theory, or publish an article in a respected medical journal.

If you stay neutral, you're in the wrong as an Eagle Scout. In my vision, being an Eagle Scouts is actively trying to do good.

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

The World Bank has not invariably been my favorite organization. The power to do good goes almost always with the possibility to do the opposite, and as a professional economist, I have had occasions in the past to wonder whther the Bank could not have done very much better.

Lawyer – One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

Philanthropist. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket...

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of an edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

BLACKGUARD, n. A man whose qualities, prepared for display like a box of berries in a market—the fine ones on top—have been opened on the wrong side. An inverted gentleman.

MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.

We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.

We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich.

ACCUSE, v.t. To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged him.

PHILANTHROPIST, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

To expect that men who do not honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably and intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool.