Quotes About Ethics

Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency?

The appeal was so often the same: Make me comfortable so I can go on doing whatever I want to do. They wanted sin without consequences.

Each time a thought came knocking on the door of her mind, she viewed it cautiously. Was it true? Was it honorable? Was it pure or lovely? Was it of good repute?

So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. JESUS, MATTHEW 7 : 12

He knew that beauty faded quickly when embodied by selfishness...

Money is a great servant but a bad master.

Not many years ago there were people in this country who would tell you that there are no absolute moral principles and that we should not presume to impose our principles on others, but of course the Vietnam War was absolutely immoral.

At a political science convention which I attended some years ago, one of the speakers mentioned toward the end of his talk that the education code of every state in the Union gives the public schools a mandate to form moral character. In the discussion period that followed a young woman with a marked Southern accent protested: Ah am shocked by what Ah just heard—it goes against everything Ah learned in graduate school!

Would not intentional restrictions on the progress of life-saving science, simply to allow ethics to "catch up," be themselves unethical?

No juzgar es motivo de esperanza infinita. Todavía creo que perdería algo si olvidara que, como sugería mi padre con cierto esnobismo, y como con cierto esnobismo repito ahora, el más elemental sentido de la decencia se reparte desigualmente al nacer.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

Why isn't he dead?' he said eventually. 'That is a good question. After all, meaning well hasn't been a completely adequate shield in this century of ours.

If Christianity is anything, it's a refusal to see human behavior as ruled by the balance sheet. We're not supposed to see the things we do as adding up into piles of good and evil we can subtract from each according to some kind of calculus to tell us how, on balance, we're doing.

Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

When I am Weaker Thn You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.

When I need to identify rebels, I look for men with principles

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God? Muad'Dib

There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it's all the same.

Never obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law . Always do it for an overriding purpose—and know your purpose !

And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.