Best 1285 quotes in «ethics quotes» category

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that there is something seriously wrong with this system. Capitalism is a system that puts rich people on a pedestal, legalizes greed, and enables the rich to exploit the poor. It’s morally wrong. What kind of a God would support something so immoral? Would Jesus support the exploitation of the poor by the rich? No, of course not. If you think of yourself as a follower of Christ’s teachings, if you consider yourself a good person, you are morally obligated to be against greed. It’s your duty as a good person to be against exploitation. It’s your moral duty to be against predatory capitalism.

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

You honor yourself by acting with dignity and composure.

You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B?

You know the world has gone mad when those who have enlightened, compassionate views and future visions, are accused of borderline insanity, ridiculed and criticised for thinking positively.

You make me a sinner if you stop me giving you hospitality.

You think because he arrested me that throws it off again I reckon? I don’t. It’s his job. It’s what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn’t jest break the law, I made a livin at it. . . . More money in three hours than a workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it’s harder work? No, because a man who makes a livin doin something that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford’s been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn’t for Gifford, the law, I wouldn’t of had the job I had blockading and if it wadn’t for me blockading, Gifford wouldn’t of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who?

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.

You think you're superior to the others, don't you? We'll you're not. In fact you're worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.

According to our Christian ethics, we're supposed to love God, love each other and help take care of the poor. It is immoral to charge somebody making $5,000 an income tax.

You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?" "The difference," I answered carefully, "lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.

A business is seldom if ever built up except on lines of strictest integrity.

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.

Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

Across professions, consistency is a direct product of work ethic.

Activity is not output.

Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.

All ethical people strive to choose "right" over "easy" when confronted by situations that force them to choose one or the other.

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

All phenomena link together in a mutually conditioning network.

Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

All of the artists that I've worked with have an incredible work ethic. And Madonna has the best work ethic of them all. I've learned a lot from being around her.

A lot of fishermen are telling us they like things the way they are. They aren't pushing for the change. It's part of the conservation ethic that coastal fishermen have developed.

All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things.

Altruism demands that an individual serve others, but doesn’t stipulate whether those others should be one’s family, or the homeless, or society as a whole. Collectivism states that, in politics, society comes first and the individual must obey. Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics.

A lover would find life less broken apart after a misguided love affair if they could feel that they had been sinful rather than foolish.

A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else.

A nation's domestic and foreign policies and actions should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation.

An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march.

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

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

An ethic is not an ethic, and a value not a value without somesacrifice for it. Something given up, something not gained.

A person's ethics and character are not tested in good times. It is only in bad times that a person shows how steadfast he is to his dharma.

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

Apart from values and ethics which I have tried to live by, the legacy I would like to leave behind is a very simple one - that I have always stood up for what I consider to be the right thing, and I have tried to be as fair and equitable as I could be.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

A people and their religion must be judged by social standards based on social ethics. No other standard would have any meaning if religion is held to be necessary good for the well-being of the people.

A salesperson’s ethics and values contribute more to sales success than do techniques or strategies.

Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite.

As a matter of ethics - our broader social life needs to be constrained by law and other devices - resolving at the societal level matters that should not be left for individual ethical negotiation. What is important - in the end - is that we are enabled to flourish in ways that acknowledge our dignity.

As a guide to engineering ethics, I should like to commend to you a liberal adaptation of the injunction contained in the oath of Hippocrates that the professional man do nothing that will harm his client.