Quotes About Ethics

He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.

But the measure of a man was the degree to which he was prepared to inconvenience himself for what was right;

Law and justice are not the same.

You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted by what has been done in its name.

If he has a weakness, it's that he's a moral being. Where possible, he'll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong he'll bear the guilt of it.

We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for a greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live, and one life to give.

It has always seemed to me that there are two types of people in this world: those rendered impotent by the sheer weight of evil it contains, and who refuse to act because they see no point, and those who choose their battles and fight them to the end, as they understand that to do nothing is definitely worse than to do something and fail. --The Collector

You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don't do fractions.

The law wasn't a great business to be in if one valued truth, or even justice.

Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.

After all, not doing bad things is not the same as doing good things, but that is why you and I will never become saints.

Most people are not bad. Oh, they do bad things sometimes, and we all have a little badness in us, but very few people are unspeakably evil, and most of the bad things they do seem perfectly reasonable to them at the time. Perhaps they're bored, or selfish, or greedy, but, for the most part, they don't actually want to hurt anyone when they do bad things. They just want to make their own lives a little easier.

which was mainly the criminals, the

Dobey was all for the Second Amendment, but even at the best of times he regarded anyone who entered a restaurant, store, or public park while flaunting a gun as a cocksucker of the highest order, and that went double for Dobey's own place of business.

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death. —Revelation 21:8

I think Philip could spend an afternoon throwing puppies from the top of the Empire State and only stop when his arm got tired." "It's not the same as killing

I've started to believe that most people do what they think is right. The problems arise when what they do is right for themselves, but not what's right for others.

If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.

the law cannot respect the conscience of flesh-and-blood human beings unless it also recognizes conscience claims brought by the corporations they form.

A person is better off for having performed sincere religious acts even when they rest on false premises.

twenty-three years of RFRAs to produce anarchy,

convictions, as it did by requiring the Hahns and Greens in Hobby Lobby to lose millions, or their business. Corvino

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put the point sharply: "With or without [religion], you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."120

integrity—in their specific sense of harmony between belief and action—may lack value when the underlying belief is badly wrong. And one way to determine when the belief is badly wrong is its tendency to cause harm to others.