Quotes About Ethics

Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.

The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

The Christianity of America is a Christianity, of whose votaries it may be as truly said, as it was of the ancient scribes and Pharisees, 'They bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,—before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.

I have found that, to make a contented slave," writes Douglass "it is necessary to make a thoughtless one…He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

Without any appeal to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, it was enough to accept God as a father, to regard slavery as a crime. I

A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind.

Men who live by robbing their fellow men of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder. They have by the single act of slaveholding voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates - the common enemies of God and of all mankind.

Reader! Are you with the man-stealers in sympathy and purpose, or on the side of their down-trodden victims? If with the former, then you are the foe of God and man.

the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just.

The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . .Make a man a slave, and youmrob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.

Slaveholders have no rights more than any other thief or pirate. They have forfeited even the right to live, and if the slave should put every one of them to the sword tomorrow, who dare pronounce the penalty disproportioned to the crime or say that the criminals deserved less than death at the hands of their long-abused chattels? (The North Star, Volume II, #7 February 9, 1849)

Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a nigger-breaker.

There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy; hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.

Those who have abandoned God cling that much more firmly to the faith in morality.

If the morality of thou shalt not lie is rejected, the sense for truth will have to legitimize itself before another tribunal:— as a means of the preservation of man, as will to power.

The deepest and most sublime hatred is a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values—something whose like has never been seen on earth

The corruption of morals is a consequence of decadence (weakness of the will, need for strong stimuli).

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

A pillar of trash once affirmed of itself (unwittingly) and others I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience, most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you