Quotes About Ethics

Fairy stories had introduced him to morality and he came to believe that only in morality was reality.

The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie

Then when G-d asks [Cain], 'Where is your brother Abel?' he arrogantly responds, 'I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?' In essence, the entire Bible is written as an affirmative response to this question.

action is the paramount thing. And certainly one should not use words to justify one's own self-interest." When

On the Rebbe's willingness to offer opinions and advice on a large range of issues, including theology, business, family affairs, and even medical questions: "[First] I am not afraid to answer that I don't know. If I know, then I have no right not to answer. When someone comes to you for help and you can help him to the best of your knowledge, and you refuse him this help, you become a cause of his suffering.

Never use damaging personal information to invalidate your adversary and, by implication, his contentions. ... If you watch your words when you fight, the issue can usually be resolved.

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal, when he wantonly destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.

Book: [to Mal] If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

To summarize, just because you can overload methods doesn't mean you should.

If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.

Malcolm: So me and mine gotta lay down and die... So you can live in your better world? Operative: I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. I'm a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it. But it must be done.

true. When you do this: You are not telling a fantasy. You are not making a mistake. You are lying. Lying is trying to make someone believe something that is not true. It is deceiving or

Lying is not a good thing to do. When you lie:

There are many ways to tell lies. You can tell lies with your actions.

You might cause someone to believe something that is not true by acting a certain way. You are lying when you do this.

Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?

her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own to minimize conflict.

For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.

As our great American philosopher William James has said, an individual has as many selves as there are individuals whom he knows. There isn't the slightest hypocrisy in this, but only pragmatic ethics. For not all persons are worthy of our acquaintance, and not all persons require equal time from us. You save your most valuable 'personality' for the most valuable persons you know.

For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a "sensationalist" rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave!

evil' is after all a relative term: there being a minor and pragmatical sort, to be disposed of as one swats a fly, and a vast, all-encompassing, one might say universal sort, that must be halted by any means at hand.

if she petted or fed one animal in the presence of others, she must pet and feed them all. It was what Jesus would have done had He lived intimately with animals.

For the wanting to be good,in defiance of justice, is one of mankind's greatest weaknesses.

No noose is good noose'—as the condemned man said on the scaffold.