Ethics Quotes

“It is very wrong to kill any one[.]"
"Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!”
― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

“The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“One can reach the gates of hell just as easily by short steps as by large.”
― Douglas Preston, The Cabinet of Curiosities

“Innocence could be lost more than once after all.”
― Selena Kitt, Confession

“We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“Don't judge me. Ethics and morality no longer exist in our world. It's a luxury of the past, afforded only to those who had a future.”
― T.M. Williams, Undead Winter

“وعلى المرء أن يفي بما يعد حتى ولو كان متأخرا”
― Ivan Klíma, No Saints or Angels

“I am not well-versed in theory, but in my view, the cow deserves her life. As does the ram. As does the ladybug. As does the elephant. As do the fish, and the dog and the bee; as do other sentient beings. I will always be in favor of veganism as a minimum because I believe that sentient beings have a right not to be used as someone else's property. They ask us to be brave for them, to be clear for them, and I see no other acceptable choice but to advocate veganism. If these statements make me a fundamentalist, then I will sew a scarlet F on my jacket so that all may know I'm fundamentally in favor of nonviolence; may they bury me in it so that all will know where I stood.”
― Vincent J. Guihan

“So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

“If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?”
― K.L. Toth

“One's interest or need does not annul other's right.”
― Al-Hafiz B.A. Masri, Islamic Concern for Animals

“Without ethics, science would be cruelty.”
― Nenia Campbell, Wishing Stars: Space Opera Fairytales

“And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?”
― Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

“I cannot kill someone, he thought.”
― Lois Lowry, Son

“Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy.”
― Darrell Drake, Everautumn

“... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Our gods, if we choose to believe in them, must be forced to live up to ethics that far surpass our own human standards. If they fall short of the ethical conditions we place upon ourselves, what use are they to us - except to rationalize our own failures?”
― Stifyn Emrys

“Judge character by behavior.”
― Lizelle Du Plessis, Ethereal Revelations Volume I

“Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I’ve done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn’t hear them calling my name.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife

“Each of us lives with a sword over his head.
There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties

“Une éthique véritablement socialiste, c'est-à-dire qui cherche la justice sans supprimer la liberté, qui impose aux individus des charges mais sans abolir l'individualité, se trouvera fort embarrassée par les problèmes que pose la condition de la femme.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, I

“ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas.”
― Martin Cohen, 101 Ethical Dilemmas

“The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity

“There are already plenty of people who will take a firm stand on the need to be competely impartial between right and wrong.”
― Martin Cohen, 101 Ethical Dilemmas

“Evolution, energy, and ethics are the core elements that will guide us along the challenging path toward the Life Era: the first - evolution - because a good understanding of our universal roots and of our place in the cosmic scheme of things will help us create a feasible future course; the second - energy - because our fate will bear strongly on the ways that humankind learns to use energy efficiently and safely; and the third - ethics - because global citizenship and a planetary society are crucial factors in the survival of our species.”
― Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

“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, The Society of S

“The laws of men are not infallible.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“La mayoría nos formulamos la pregunta "¿Qué gano yo si lo hago?" más habitual de lo que nos interrogamos si "¿Es lo que estoy haciendo moral o correcto en términos políticos?".
[…] en ninguna otra época como en la actual se han dejado de lado con tanta insistencia otras cuestiones, tanto en la vida pública como en la privada. No es que tomar decisiones pensando en el beneficio práctico sea reprobable en sí mismo o deba conducir a un daño moral irreparable; sin embargo, cuanto más subordinamos nuestras ideas y nuestro mundo interior a criterios económicos, más se reducen aquellos y más rápidamente se llega a la conclusión lógica de que ningún tipo de compromiso vale la pena, excepto el que sirve directa o indirectamente a nuestro propio interés; que las ideas sólo poseen cierto valor si pueden transformarse en moneda de cambio; que un proyecto sólo debe ser tenido en cuenta si arroja beneficios de algún tipo.”
― Meredith Haaf, Wir Alphamädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht