Ethics Quotes

“Sometimes it isn't easy to be sane, smart, and responsible. Sometimes it sucks. Sucks wang. Camel wang. But that doesn't turn wrong into right or stupid into smart.”
― Jim Butcher, Cold Days

“As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long - that is the sign of strong full natures in whom there is an excess of power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget. Mirabeau had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because he - forgot. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug the many vermin that eat deep into others.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals

“The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to produce evidence of this, because doing could provoke earthquakes and Africanized bee attacks.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Ethics is a dream.”
― Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

“The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand-from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: 'How can I be good?' and 'How can I do something good?' Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: 'What is the will of God?”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Señal de tener gastada la fama propia es cuidar de la infamia ajena.”
― Baltasar Gracián

“Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society”
― Bertrand Russell

“Every social ethic is doomed to failure if it is blind to personal responsibility" (The Ten Commandments, 10).”
― J. Douma

“His moral lecture
blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far?”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“In the newspapers the row about the prospect of genetically modified food raged on, and yet here were consumers effectively demanding lambs with four back legs.”
― Rose Prince

“Our stable and eternal verities are being challenged. There's a kind of postmodern breakdown in journalism. The breadth of information sources and the speed of transmission are growing; but the traditional gravity of news has eroded. -Jin Yongquan ”
― Judy Polumbaum, China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism

“And now they were weary and frightened because they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them. They knew that the team and the wagon were worth much more. They knew the buyer man would get much more, but they didn't know how to do it. Merchandising was a secret to them.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“There’s such a thing as being irritatingly ethical,” said Eldric. “That’s you, right now.”

That’s a pleasant change. Witches are rarely accused of being irritatingly ethical.

“I’ve swigged.” I handed the bottle to Eldric. “Or is it swug?”

“Swug,” said Eldric. “It is in bad-boy circles, at least.” He swug. “It tastes much better outside church.”

“It’s the picnic principle,” I said. “Things taste better outdoors. And if it’s a forbidden thing, so much the better.”
― Franny Billingsley, Chime

“Man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It's frustrating to witness how popular Fairtrade bananas, coffee and tea have become with shoppers and supermarkets while plenty of unfair trade goes on, largely unnoticed, in our own back yard.”
― Rose Prince

“It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

“The role of any person in this world is to be themselves without damaging the rest. We are important as long as the rest "is". - Rossana Condoleo”
― Rossana Condoleo

“With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.”
― P.D. James, The Private Patient

“We cannot respect something just because millions or billions believe in it! We can respect something only if it is complying with the high intelligence and the ethics!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“To kill an animal in order to satisfy your nutritional desires, not your nutritional needs, that seems to me to be completely unacceptable.”
― David Benatar

“A wronged person is still a wronged person even if they're an unfashionable wronged person.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“Ethical actions can often entail short-term pain, but will always result in long-term gains. By contrast, unethical actions frequently have short-term gains, which make them so attractive. But I guarantee that unethical actions will always result in some form of long-term pain and ultimate collapse, frequently in unexpected ways.”
― Kashonia Carnegie PhD

“The permanent interest of every man is never to be in a false position.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Volume I)

“The ground for morality can only be prepared when a greater individual or collective-individual, as, for example, society or state, subjects the individuals in it, that is, when it draws them out of their isolatedness and integrates them into a union. Force precedes morality; indeed, for a time morality itself is a force, to which others acquiesce to avoid unpleasere. Later it becomes custom, and still later free obedience and finally almost instinct: then it is coupled to pleasure, like all habitual and natural things, and is now called virtue.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“No justice movement in history would have been successful if it had tailored its language to the oppressors.”
― Alex J. O'Connor