Quotes About Ethics

men can be pigs, but also the opposite. what is the opposite of a pig?

Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I'm awaiting virtuous reality.

I value peace when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.

Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.

As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

Moral indignation is a bad counsellor.

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

One person of integrity can make a difference.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides.

Only the guilty are guilty. Their children are not.

It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. "Ethics" meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That's why it was called "golden," like the golden ratio.

Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.

Someone whose only reason for not acting in an antisocial way was that they were scared of getting in trouble with God . . . where did you even start with such a person?

What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

Respect for the dead comes second to respect for the living, and I believe no man's demise exempts him from culpability.

There are two ways to die here,' the fighter concluded. 'You can die doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or die doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

But it is often easier to compel a hundred people to do what you could never compel one person to do. The lone man must consult his conscience, that stern and unflattering arbiter. A man in a crowd, though, can turn to the others, as the others turn to one another, each justifying the deed by referring to the next man, or to the force of all the men together. This

Every single pagan philosopher of the ancient world said that if you wanted to be free, you had to learn the hard ways of virtue and that the worst form of slavery was slavery to your own appetites.

People with a strong sense of being embodied creatures, rather than being bundles of appetite provided with the machinery of a body to work upon, will prove difficult to persuade in the coming century of the biotechnocrats.