Best 137 quotes in «ethical quotes» category

Most priests wish they were as righteous as they seem to most members of their congregations.

My ethical values prevent me from investing in the stock market.

Someone once said to me, 'There are so many religions in the world. They can't all be right.' And my reply was, 'Well, they can't all be wrong either.' All religions in the world today share more commonalities than differences, yet language blinds many from seeing these truths. Some people will tell me that what I write about is straight from their holy book, but the truth is that the main principles found in all holy books were already engraved in all our hearts. If you think common sense, the golden rule and knowing right from wrong are exclusive only to your faith, then you need to open yourself up to the rest of the world's religions.

One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans. A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?” Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach

Shame on the misguided, the blinded, the distracted and the divided. Shame. You have allowed deceptive men to corrupt and desensitize your hearts and minds to unethically fuel their greed.

The fundamental principle of morality which we seek as a necessity for thought is not, however, a matter only of arranging and deepening current views of good and evil, but also of expanding and extending these. A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succour, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.

There's something immoral about abandoning your common sense in matters of social importance.

To have been possessed by something so awful and so alien, and then the next morning wake up from it, remember what happened, and realize what I had done, with a clear mind and all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact at that moment, [I was] absolutely horrified that I was capable of doing something like that.

To respect law, a man carries mercy with his endeavours. To respect ethics, he moves on wasteful relationships.

Not every wish you wish comes true and this is a great blessing for you because not every wish you wish is ethical, only some are!

Some people that are in charge are usually less intelligent than the people who work under them. The reason why those people are in charge and you aren’t is because you have a conscience.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution consists in the triumph of this principle over the medieval and mercantilist regulations. Modern economy first begins with the introduction of the principle of laissez-faire, and the idea of individual freedom first succeeds in establishing itself as the ideology of this economic liberalism. These connections do not, of course, prevent both the idea of labour and the idea of freedom from developing into independent ethical forces and from often being interpreted in a really idealistic sense. But to realize how small a part was played by idealism in the rise of economic liberalism, it is only necessary to recall that the demand for freedom of trade was directed, above all, against the skilled master, in order to take away from him the only advantage he had over 55 the mere contractor. Adam Smith himself was still far from claiming such idealistic motives for the justification of free competition; on the contrary, he saw in human selfishness and the pursuit of personal interests the best guarantee for the smooth functioning of the economic organism and the realization of the general weal. The whole optimism of the enlightenment was bound up with this belief in the selfregulating power of economic life and the automatic adjustment of conflicting interests; as soon as this began to disappear, it became more and more difficult to identify economic freedom with the interests of the general weal and to regard free competition as a universal blessing.

The only way a society of diverse people can survive without tearing itself apart over differences in nature is by accepting that ALL people are different, and that no single one of us is more or less deserving of decent treatment, compassion, legal and ethical equality, justice, life, or love, than any other.

We never know what’s in us till we stand by ourselves” (George Meredith, ORF)

When you have much higher ethical values than the ethical values of your own people, you stop belonging to your own people, to your own country because your people and your country are now located in the low levels of humanity!

Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you’re due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings.

Whatever be your obsession, it needs not to be reasonable- but ethical.

Achievers must not be penalized or parasites rewarded if we aspire to a healthy, productive, and ethical society.

We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.

You are responsible for everything you TWEET and RETWEET.

American public should understand what happened with adoption and why, so that our government can be held accountable moving forward, and we can know how to engage in ethical adoptions, know how to make it something good for everyone involved, not exploitative.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

An ethical atheist is infinitely more valuable than an unethical pious! What matters is whether you are ethical or not; your beliefs are utterly trivial beside this matter!

An ethical act is one which does not harm others' experience or expectation of happiness.

And what it depends on, of course, is whether the story itself is worth the ethical compromise it requires and whether the competition is onto the story.

At the center of the Christian faith is the affirmation that there is a God in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality. A Being of infinite love and boundless power, God is the creator, sustainer, and conserver of values....In contrast to the ethical relativism of [totalitarianism], Christianity sets forth a system of absolute moral values and affirms that God has placed within the very structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable.

Compassion is ethical intelligence: it is the capacity to make connections and the consequent urge to act to relieve the suffering of others.

But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

Ethical decisions ensure that everyone's best interests are protected. When in doubt, don't.

Ethical existence [is] the highest manifestation of spirituality.

Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.

Ethical obligation has to subordinate itself to the totalitarian nature of war.

As soon as you start mixing up politics and some sort of ethical code in music, you've got it all wrong.

Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. ... The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae.

Ethical and responsible behavior needs to become the cornerstone of corporate behavior

Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

For when it is the good that is under consideration, and the ethical object is predominant, truth must be considered more in reference to art than science, if, that is, unity is to be preserved in the work generally.

Every day we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

I am committed to working towards a more transparent, accountable, and ethical federal government worthy of the publics trust.

Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question Have we anything to eat? will be answered not in material but in ethical terms.

I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

I do not know what horrified me most [during the depression]: the economic misery of my companions [or] their moral and ethical coarseness.

I believe that there has to be an ideal and I favour an ethical anarchism which can be cohered into an ideal.

I do not think that we have psychological and ethical and economic problems. We have human problems, with psychological, ethical and economical aspects, and as many others as you like.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

I'm very involved with PETA - People for Ethical Treatment of Animals - and Greenpeace and a lot of women's shelter and clothing giveaways.

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it.

If you’re the type of person who wants to associate exclusively with those who perfectly mirror your own ethical worldview, you’re reducing significantly the scope of your potential life experience.