Quotes About Ethics

And then, to top off the joke, if that is what it is, there are the people with more income than anyone else who pay less tax than anyone else—that is, those with annual incomes of a million dollars or more who manage to find perfectly legal ways of paying no income tax at all.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

Right! Right! 'Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it's dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can't they be made to strain out their own shit?

The true test of a man's character is not how he treats his friends, but how he treats his enemies.

Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.

Saint abroad, and a devil at home.

Faithful: What! why he (Shame) objected against religion itself; he said it was a pitiful, low, sneaking business for a man to mind religion; he said that a tender conscious was an unmanly thing; and that for a man to watch over his words and ways, so as to tie himself up from that hectoring liberty that the brave spirits of the times accustom themselves unto, would make him the ridicule of the times."

You don't understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha. What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way

Sincerity is the first casualty of capitalism. We

The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.

You come before me this morning with clean hands and clean collars. I want you to have clean tongues, clean manners, clean morals and clean characters.

No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins, any more than it was my decision to bring them into the world.

Who are we to make such a decision? To allow another living being - any living being - to die, when ours is the power to prevent it? - Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic)

Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts.

It is character, not numbers, that make the world go 'round.

And we think more like managers, whose task is to do things right, than as leaders, whose task is to do the right thing.

How will machines know what we value if we don't know ourselves?

Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.

When power is the only coin, they said, you have nothing left to sell but your soul.

No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice.

In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. —The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 183

The second kind are invited by bad character, and the problems such a person has then cannot be put right until he puts himself right. It is not something a proud man can do, because proud men see no wrongness in themselves.

For as 'Wright's Ninth Rule of Writing' states, every story teaches a moral, whether intended by the author or not.

I maintain that all spirituality must be founded on moral life; but on the other hand, moral life must, so to speak, bathe itself in the ocean of contemplation. Without contemplation, the moral life would tend to degenerate into a dry and narrow humanism. Without the moral life, contemplation would be empty and degenerate into quietism.