Quotes About Ethics

Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent." I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred.

History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.

omul fie creeaza,fie distruge..neutralitate nu exista..

It never seems to occur to such criminals that to behave with decency to another human being might also be gratuitous.

Skandal? ?ovjek ne treba da se povu?e pred malim skandalom. Bilo bi mu?no, groteskno, ali skandal je ipak neka vrsta službe društvu.

And although not convinced by her, I wasn't utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and remorse that wombs should ever be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons, and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much.

For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.

More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don't either.

But what about justice?—Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without—totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle.

But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world—the world as it existed for that person.

Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?

Wait a minute, though: Sammler denied himself the privilege of the high-principled intellectual who must always be applying the purest standards and thumping the rest of his species on the head. When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first.

Y is convinced that Israel has sinned too much, that it has become too corrupt, and that it has lost its moral capital and has nothing to fight with.

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.

If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get... sewage.

One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.

man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object than causing pain…No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial

I would define an asshole as anyone who chooses to make the lives of others less pleasant for reasons that don't appear productive or necessary.

If something is legal and profitable, it will happen, a lot.

Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen.

Did the businessman owe his current employer loyalty? Not in his view. The businessman didn't invent capitalism, and he didn't create its rules. He simply played within the rules. His employers wouldn't have hesitated to fire him at the drop of a hat for any reason that fit their business needs. He simply followed their example.

Likewise, it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing.

When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral.