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Ethics Quotes
"Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked."
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"Self-preservation isn't worth it if you can't live with the self you're preserving."
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"And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."
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"Since then your sere Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me."
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"I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all."
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"Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them."
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"We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values."
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"Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it."
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"The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters."
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"I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war."
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"Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief."
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"Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder."
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"The product of scientific achievements should be for sale. The scientist should not."
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"The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists."
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"What I don't like is what it sometimes takes to win. Backstabbing. Manipulation. Out-and-out bribery once in a while, and not always the monetary kind."
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"You fault me for having standards?' Sebastian countered icily.'Not at all. I fault you for having two sets of them.'~ Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent & Cam Rohan."
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"What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives."
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"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."
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"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals."
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"Absolute values are the things that are important whether you like them or not. Relative values depend on social contexts and personal preferences and conditions of life. Our current market system pursues relative transient values at the cost of absolute lasting values."
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"In times of war, as in life, surround yourself with people of value, virtue and high morals, because it's always better to lose, perish and vanish in glory than to live in shame."
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"The source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being namely, that his errors are corrigible."
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"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it."
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"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
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"Integrity is the best attire to put on because the without integrity one cannot conceal his nakedness."
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"Trust isn't just the greatest currency, it's the only currency. Once trust is gone in any form of currency, the value is gone."
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"We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave to us."
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"I resent being lied to because a lie doesn't only undermine the value of the truth, but it further denies the liar a fair chance for honesty."
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"Oh, why did he slap her when she's a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn't have a husband to speak for her."
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"Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal."
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"Never ruin an apology with an excuse."
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"Since evil is nothing positive, there can be no principle of evil. It has no meaning expect in reference to something good."
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"It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself."
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"Do your thing, without harming anything."
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"What is worse than doing evil, is being evil (Ethics, p.67). To lie is wrong, but what is worse than the lie is the liar, for the liar contaminates everything he says, because everything he says is meant to further a cause that is false. The liar as liar has endorsed a world of falsehood and deception, and to focus only on the truth or falsity of his particular statements is to miss the danger of being caught up in his twisted world. This is why, as Bonhoeffer says, that "(i)t is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie (Ethics, p.67)."
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