Quotes About Ethics

The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.

To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart. If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves...

Dan," she said. "I'm worried about him. It's not right that a thirteen-year-old knows as much as he does bout stealing things." " You're right," Jake said. "He should have been at least sixteen like you before he became part of an international crime ring.

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact. The artist is not a moralist by conscious intention, but is concerned only with hearing and expressing the vision within his or her own being. But out of the symbols the artist sees and creates—as Giotto created the forms for the Renaissance—there is later hewn the ethical structure of the society.

And did not Spinoza's refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?

Bir kimsenin ancak sorumlu oldu?u ölçüde özgür olabilece?i paradoksu özgürlü?ün her noktas?nda merkezdedir. Fakat aksi de do?rudur. Bir kimse ancak özgür oldu?unda sorumlu olabilir.

When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the "whole man." When people today use the term they almost

Myth safeguards and enforces morality," as Malinowski proclaimed, and if there are no myths there will be no morality.

Riskless warfare in pursuit of human rights is a moral contradiction. The concept of human rights assumes that all human life is of equal value. Risk-free warfare presumes that our lives matter more than those we are intervening to save.

Je crois que c'est les injustes qui dorment le mieux, parce qu'ils s'en foutent, alors que les justes ne peuvent pas fermer l'oeil et se font du mauvais sang pour tout.

Kartais man atrodo, kad gyvenu jau tik iš mandagumo, ir jeigu dar leidžiu plakti savo širdžiai, tai tik tod?l, kad visada m?gau gyv?nus.

It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're in the gutter, Colonel Babcock.

Io credo che sono gli ingiusti quelli che dormono meglio, perché se ne fregano, mentre i giusti non possono chiudere occhio e si fanno il sangue marcio per tutto. Se no non sarebbero giusti.

Le paradoxe de la science est qu'il n'y a qu'une réponse à ses méfaits et à ses périls : encore plus de science.

A civilization worthy of that name will always feel guilty toward Man and that is, precisely, what makes it a civilization." Pascal, probably. It's always Pascal with the French, when it's not La Rochefoucauld. Aristocratic bastards.

That might be, but that's exactly where betrayal of human values begins: when the approach to science is merely scientific.

Yet the only answer to science was more science. Neither was there a lack of clever rationalizations. The ethical way out of scientists who had built the "ultimate" nuclear weapon was that it would make war impossible. The Cercle Érasme had a similar purpose in mind: They were set on taking the power-mad giants even farther in the same direction.

Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.

This was however NOT the scientist's responsibility. Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.

No one has ever managed to resolve the contradiction there is in wanting to defend something human in the company of men.

Give an intellectual any ideal and any evil passion and he will always succeed in harmonizing the twain.

it must be admitted that on neither side have they brought honor to the cause of reason, which they have not been able to protect against the winds of violence and folly.