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Ethics Quotes
"Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not see."
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"Behavior has consequences, and stupid behavior often has terrible consequences."
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"A man, who does not commit an evil act either, has no opportunity or the stomach."
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"Let your kindness, your compassion and your listening ear speaks itself."
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"She felt that "truthful and "honest were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn't eaten Roselyn's Chinese leftovers, but that wasn't honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object."
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"Laches faded away, leaving Miriam standing facing Hyperion, the Metigen who had orchestrated the slaughter of over fifty million people a short year ago.There were limits to even deals with the devil, lines which should never be crossed but she was beginning to wonder when she might find one."
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"Specifically, I'd like to debate whether cannibalism ought to be grounds for leniency in murders, since it's less wasteful."
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"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."
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"He that flings dirt at another dirtieth himself most."
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"We have to dedicate ourselves to a holy way of life, to justice, honesty and loyalty."
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"Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies."
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"It seems - and who so astonished as they? - that they had held back material facts; that they were guilty of both suppressio veri and suggestio falsi (well-known gods against whom they often offended); further, that they were malignant in their dispositions, untrustworthy in their characters, pernicious and revolutionary in their influences, abandoned to the devils of wilfulness, pride, and a most intolerable conceit. Ninthly, and lastly, they were to have a care and to be very careful."
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"Do business with honesty irrespective of what happens, whatever happens thereafter is correct. But do not start any accounts (karma)."
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"One great objection to the Old Testament is the cruelty said to have been commanded by God. All these cruelties ceased with death. The vengeance of Jehovah stopped at the tomb. He never threatened to punish the dead; and there is not one word, from the first mistake in Genesis to the last curse of Malachi, containing the slightest intimation that God will take his revenge in another world. It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the doctrine of eternal pain."
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"Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil."
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"We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach."
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"Requiring accountability while also extending your compassion is not the easiest course of action, but it is the most humane, and, ultimately, the safest for the community."
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"There is only one sin, only one, and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right of a husband, you rob his children of a father. When you lie you steal someone's right to truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no more wretched act than stealing. A man who takes what is not his to take, be it life or a loaf of naan, I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him."
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"Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of Hell? Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To worship an eternal gaoler hardens, debases, and pollutes even the vilest soul. While there is one sad and breaking heart in the universe, no good being can be perfectly happy."
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"I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are."
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"If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals."
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"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
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"When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit-and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it."
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"Are there anything more dishonourable and more coward than not marching in front of the army after taking the decision of war as a politician? Sending others for dying but keeping himself in safety is the affair of the low man only!"
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"Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?"
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"Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right."
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"Some people love to judge others based on their past weaknesses, mistakes and failures, but expect those same people to judge them by their current improved conditions. So what happen to the golden rule of treating others as you would expect them to treat you?"
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"If a country successfully translate the principles of truth and honesty into their social life, social issues and problems are resolved in a civilized manner."
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"We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense."
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