Ethics Quotes

You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.

Even moderation ought not to be practised to excess.

When a blind man carries the lame man both go forward.

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities improve their talents but impair their virtues and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.

Charles Caleb Colton

Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential - generosity service self-sacrifice unselfishness and duty.

Willard Gaylen

If your morals make you dreary depend on it they are wrong.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.

Henry David Thoreau

Moral courage is a more rare commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.

Robert F. Kennedy

Morality is not respectability.

George Bernard Shaw

Moral indignation - jealousy with a halo.

H.G.Wells

Nobody does nothing for nobody for naught.

Peter Lord

The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized vilified and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness and every man understands too that it is no proof of greatness.

Elbert Hubbard

The so-called new morality has too often the old immorality condoned.

Lord Shawcross

To act without rapacity to use knowledge with wisdom to respect interdependence to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.

Barbara Ward

If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed I should close instantly with the offer.

Thomas Huxley

We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and the other which we practice but seldom preach.

Bertrand Russell

There are ten commandments right? Well it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten you're just about top of the class.

Mordecai Richler

A man does not have to be an angel in order to be a saint.

Albert Schweitzer

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

Michel de Montaigne

It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

Adlai Stevenson

Only that which does not teach which does not cry out which does not condescend which does not explain is irresistible.

William Butler Yeats

Quality - in its classic Greek sense - how to live with grace and intelligence with bravery and mercy.

Theodore H. White

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

Alfred North Whitehead

No morality can be founded on authority even if the authority were divine.

A.J. Ayer

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

Jacques Barzun

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite and flatterer. For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.

William Blake

You've got to be brave and you've got to be bold. Brave enough to take your chance on your own discrimination - what's right and what's wrong what's good and what's bad.

Robert Frost

Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

Logan Pearsall Smith

This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.

James Baldwin

Below the navel there is neither religion nor truth.

Italian proverb

It is customary these days to ignore what should be done in favour of what pleases us.

Plautus

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

Henry David Thoreau

A truth that's told with bad intent - beats all the lies you can invent.

William Blake

An election is a moral horror as bad as a battle except for the blood a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

George Bernard Shaw

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Every man has his moral backside too which he doesn't expose unnecessarily but keeps covered as long as possible by the trousers of decorum.

G. C. Lichtenberg

In statesmanship get formalities right never mind about the moralities.

Mark Twain

It is a public scandal that gives offence and it is no sin to sin in secret.

Molière

Moral indignation is in most cases 2% moral 48% indignation and 50% envy.

Vittorio de Sica

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.

H.L. Mencken

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture - and very much to our credit.

Thomas Huxley

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.

Louis Kronenberger

Straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life and few there be that find it.

Bible

The flea though he kill none he does all the harm he can.

John Donne

The only people who should really sin are the people who can sin with a grin.

Ogden Nash

Would you agree," he said, "that man's sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible?""Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain." My father crossed his arms. "And only if one man's pleasure is as important as any other's.

Susan Hubbard

He sells his loyalties to the highest bidder. Shouldn’t even a mercenary have morals? That’s the textbook definition of a whore!

Nadia Scrieva

Men with power had the responsibility to know what was best, and they so rarely did.

Beck Sherman

Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.

Aristotle

[At the scene of a murder]The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting--for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way.

Shirley Rousseau Murphy

What interests me, personally, is work which in some way, speaks the truth to power…I don’t think we speak the truth to power for power’s ear, but for the ear and the imagination of future generations, who would seek to live in a world free from the malign and self-serving influence of those who wield it.

Irvine Welsh

Gray is not a substitute for black and white. You don’t bump into people without saying you’re sorry. When you shake hands, it’s supposed to mean something. If someone is in trouble, you reach out.

Jon M. Huntsman Sr.

Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing it into a revelation from the outside. The meaning is —there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. But it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal.So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open?

Paul Goodman

Consider the recent financial crisis and its link to faulty reward systems. President Bill Clinton's objective of increasing homeownership by rewarding potential home buyers and lenders is one example. The Clinton administration "went to ridiculous lengths" to increase homeownership in the United State, promoting "paper-thin down payments" and pushing lenders to give mortgage loans to unqualified buyers according to Business Week editor Peter Coy.

Max H. Bazerman

I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?Yes.It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous.Such as?Be not in haste, said the tortoise.There is nothing here but time.If you live long enough, you will see.Of course, though, you will see them from your cage.Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here?The tortoise chuckled. The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in.What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough?Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough.How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked.

Patrick Jennings

Until we are willing to oppose all abortion--ALL ABORTION---then the Christian community will lack the true ethical high ground to oppose ANY ABORTIONS. The minute we concede that there is any ground--even in the so-called case of rape, incest or the health of the mother---to make a decision to self-consciously and deliberately kill a child based on our puny, finite understanding of the facts, and a a cost-benefit analysis based on our pragmatic post-modern vision of utlilitarian ethics, we have conceded everything. We have abandoned biblical law and granted to Planned Parenthood the legitimacy of the core argument they have advanced since Margaret Sanger founded the organization--namely, that some circumstances of pregnancy are sufficiently uncomfortable or troubling that man has the right to play God and declare his own authority to take the life of an innocent, unborn baby.

Douglas W. Phillips

So I'd been captured? So I was starving?Did that mean I had to shrivel up and die?I could still slither. I could still hiss. Nothing had been stolen from me except my freedom.What I needed was a new plan.

Patrick Jennings

Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what’s going on.Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.

Baruch Spinoza

1 2 3 … 17 Next

Ethics Quotes

Related Topics