Quotes About Ethics

what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it.

Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.

I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless. 

Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral….

A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about happiness and suffering of sentient creatures

The link between religion and "morality"—so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated—is fully belied here, as it is wherever religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion.

Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. It is a failure of ethics.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If

Once a person accepts the premises upon which most religious identities are built, the withdrawal of his moral concern from those who do not share these premises follows quite naturally.

Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems.

You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults—and even to discourage your own sons and daughters from having premarital sex—are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering.

If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward them2—and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking

Faith is like a pockpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.

The point I'm trying to make is that we as a family have bent over backward not to take advantage of Wal-Mart, not to press our ownership position unfairly, and everybody in the company knows it. Alice

The thing is, I am absolutely convinced that the only way we can improve one another's quality of life, which is something very real to those of us who grew up in the Depression, is through what we call free enterprise—practiced correctly and morally.

But if American management is going to say to their workers that we're all in this together, they're going to have to stop this foolishness of paying themselves $3 million and $4 million bonuses every year and riding around everywhere in limos and corporate jets like they're so much better than everybody else.

A lot of what goes on these days with high-flying companies and these overpaid CEO's, who're really just looting from the top and aren't watching out for anybody but themselves, really upsets me. It's one of the main things wrong with American business today.

We don't believe in taking a lot of money out of Wal-Mart's cash registers and giving it to charity for the simple reason that any debit has to be passed along to somebody—either our shareholders or our customers.

You're never wrong to do the right thing

I do not care to speak ill of a man behind his back, but I believe he is an attorney.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.

A man must assume the moral burden of his own boredom.