Best 1285 quotes in «ethics quotes» category

All lines are gray in the dark.

All moral judgment is ultimately about the direction toward better or worse, never an absolute truth or fact.

All my life I'd thought of myself as an essentially good person, but all I'd been was comfortable.

all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka

All religions are man-made; God has not yet revealed himself beyond doubt to anybody.

All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover Him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting His way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology. Within the overarching theme of self-donation the theme of solidarity must be fully affirmed, for it underlines rightly the partiality of divine compassion towards the ‘harassed and helpless’.

All the social ills that law presumes to correct exist because people are not free to learn and grow.

Almost any established decision procedure is better than a resort to force; for when force is used, people get hurt and the desire for retaliation is likely to lead to more violence. Moreover, most decision procedures produce results at least as beneficial and just as a resort to force.

Although profanity is part of our language that we speak everyday, it can simultaneity be used as a weapon to demoralize other people if it is offensive within its meaning.

Although we cannot attain Jesus in his fullness unless at the same time we also take into account his unique relationship with God which has a special nature of its own, this does not of itself mean that Jesus' unique way of life is the only way to God. For even Jesus not only reveals God but also conceals him, since he appeared among us in non-godlike, creaturely humanity. As man he is a historical, contingent being who in no way can represent the full riches of God... unless one denies the reality of his real humanity (and that runs counter to the consensus of the church). So the gospel itself forbids us to speak of a Christian religious imperialism and exclusivism.

Altruism is not the product of religion, it precedes religion, and often times religion is its enemy.

Always be good to yourself and others. Always do what is right even if doing something wrong is quicker, more rewarding or easier. Always put truth in your every word and action, and never ignore your conscience until you die.

Always polish the dirt for a refreshing start and seek out to build new mental structures that can help you to become rejuvenated.

A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!

A man’s most valuable possession is his integrity. Unless he has no integrity. In which case, he may not have much of anything of value.

[A} maxim's legal character must be intrinsic: it must have what I shall call 'lawlike form.' this is why legal character, or universality, must be understood as lawlike form, that is, as a requirement of universalizability.

A moral dilemma can be large or small, important or inconsequential, urgent or secondary. One thing is certain: moral dilemmas are ever present.

An action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim according with which it is decided upon; it depends therefore, not on the realization of the object of action, but solely on the principle of volition in accordance with which, irrespective of all objects of the faculty of desire, the action has been performed.

An area of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as the same area of land used for grass-fed beef.

Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency. Hence the peculiar flavor of so much contemporary analytic writing—by writers less philosophically self-aware than Rorty or Lewis—in which passages of argument in which the most sophisticated logical and semantic techniques available are deployed in order to secure maximal rigor alternate with passages which seem to do no more than cobble together a set of loosely related arbitrary preferences; contemporary analytic philosophy exhibits a strange partnership between an idiom deeply indebted to Frege and Carnap and one deriving from the more simple-minded forms of existentialism

An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good.

And as the wicked are always ungrateful, and necessity leads to evil doing, and immediate advantage overcomes all considerations of the future, Ginés, who was neither grateful nor well-principled, made up his mind to steal Sancho Panza's ass.

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.

An insincere individual would feel afraid to admit the truth because he or she wants to avoid facing the consequences with a guilty conscious . Eventually, he or she will get caught and will face more serve consequences for their guilty actions including committing acts of dishonesty.

And, substantially they hope to supplant the “disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination” by what they call “education for democracy.” ... The very banality of the expression helps to ensure its triumph. Who could be against education? Who could be against democracy? Yet the phrase begs two questions: What do you mean by “education”? And what do you mean by “democracy”? The school of Dewey has long been fond of capturing words and turning them to their own purposes: they tried hard to capture “humanism”, and even laid siege to “religion” Now I am convinced that if, by “education,” the champions of this slogan mean merely recreation, socialization, and a kind of custodial jurisdiction over young people, then they are deliberately perverting a word with a reasonably distinct historical meaning and making it into what Mr. Richard Weaver, in his book, "Ethics of Rhetoric”, calls a "god-term"—that is, a charismatic expression drained dry of any objective significance, but remaining an empty symbol intended to win unthinking applause

An educated, healthy & confident nation is harder to govern

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?

An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.

Angling is a sport, so sporting ethics should apply.

Anxiety can make anybody act nasty, big or small. You will be tested for your strength, and if you are seen as too weak, you will sometimes be treated abusively, discarded and avoided. I'm not saying that this should happen. I'm simply describing human beings as they are.

Any moral ethic worth examining must be universal. That is if something is right or wrong for me, it must also be right or wrong for you. This is a system of ethics that applies universally to all individuals regardless of culture, nationality, race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, wealth, or any other distinguishing feature. Otherwise, we would have difficulty judging human action.

Anymal liberationists who release fox or chinchillas from fur farms, free veal calves from chains in abysmal crates, destroy transport trucks that haul terrified turkeys and sheep to their premature deaths, burn slaughterhouses that dismember pigs and chickens, or destroy computers in research facilities are not dangerous terrorists. Anymal liberationists simply believe that life is precious, and that an industry designed to manipulate and destroy life for the sake of profits is ethically and spiritually unacceptable. They do not target the lives of random citizens—or the lives of any citizens. Anymal liberationists do not target life—they target industries (and profits) that flourish at the expense of life—and they attempt to rescue the exploited. Terrorists kill randomly; anymal liberationists have never killed anyone. Anymal liberationists exemplify what it is to live into the core teachings of every major religion concerning rightful relations between human beings and anymals.

Any man who neglects his conscience is a dangerous animal.

Any preference for my group's interests over yours must be justified by some unbiased, disinterested ethic. Which sounds simple but, given that we're dealing with Humans and not Vulcans, it's sometimes difficult for two parties to agree on basic principles, specially parties who are unable or unwilling to switch points of view. This is the power of ethical reasoning.

Any system of ethics must account for scarcity. If it doesn’t, humanity would perish due to misallocation of finite resources, including one’s own body.

Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by.

A person who has a criminal mind and would be punished by the referees and they will remain in isolation from others as an opportunity for them to reform. When he or she get released from his or her referees' custody, he or she would have a better understanding about the ethical and moral values of his or her society and not make the same mistake again.

A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.

A revolutionary who is out to defeat his enemies could use their weapons, but not their rules.

A religion which supplies only mercy and forgiveness must create demand through systems of oppression. The genius of Christianity is that it caters to opposite extremes--the oppressed who demands mercy and the oppressor who demands forgiveness.

A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion.

Aristotle’s position on anger is that it is one of the most complex and distinctive of the human emotions, that it involves bodily, psychological, social, and moral dimensions, and that anger can and ought to be felt and acted upon in a number of right ways.

A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high values to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for ‘the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.

As for the errors I make, the only punishment I acknowledge for having made them is my awareness of those errors, and having to live with it: there is, there should be, no heavier penalty on a person's soul, mind and heart.

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.

As long as we have inequality we can never have peace.

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it.