Ethics Quotes

How many times has our conscience firmly prompted us to ‘draw the line,’ and we showed up with an eraser?

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If we dare examine our decisions, we will see our values woven in and through every single one of them. Therefore, it would do us well to take an occasional peek to insure that our values remain at their peak.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The basic teachings of the Protestants were all surrounding values, ethics and morals

~ Sunday Adelaja

It is, I think, a far lesser offense to blatantly ignore God’s directions for our lives rather than arrogantly think ourselves shrewd enough to be able to bend them to our liking without breaking them and therefore breaking ourselves.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

A world without esoteric knowledge is a poorer place and we as a humanity pay the price for the loss of its principles.

~ Belsebuub

Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other ‘no matter what’ prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent.

~ Peter Singer

A society that decides its controversial issues by ballots does better than one that uses bullets – which, after all, is no more likely to lead to the right conclusion than voting.

~ Peter Singer

Buddha wrote a code which he said would be useful to guide men in darkness, but he never claimed to be the Light of the world. Buddhism was born with a disgust for the world, when a prince's son deserted his wife and child, turning from the pleasures of existence to the problems of existence. Burnt by the fires of the world, and already weary with it, Buddha turned to ethics.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Ethics change with technology.

~ Larry Niven

The problem, really, is that while humanity continues to experience huge leaps in technology, we experience no equivalent leaps in our ethical capacity. In the never-ending arms race between technology and ethics, technology always wins. Researchers who tally the results of this immortal race have a name for it: history.

~ David J. Morris

When we perform at our highest level of potential, we are content. Because we have given I best in what we enjoy doing.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

Rose pivoted. “Alainn, can I ask you something about ethics?” Alainn nodded, slowly. “Sure.” Rose’s inhuman eyes met hers, and she asked, “Would you die to save a million people?

~ Rita Stradling

For the greater good:the phrase that always precedesthe greatest evil.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

~ Jodi Picoult

Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.

~ Marc Bekoff

Every social ethic is doomed to failure if it is blind to personal responsibility (The Ten Commandments, 10).

~ J. Douma

In a democracy, we should be reluctant to take any action that amounts to an attempt to coerce the majority, for such attempts imply the rejection of majority rule, to which there is no acceptable alternative. There may, of course, be cases where the majority decision is so appalling that coercion is justified, whatever the risk. The obligation to obey a genuine majority decision is not absolute. We show our respect for the principle, not by blind obedience to the majority, but by regarding ourselves as justified in disobeying only in extreme circumstances.

~ Peter Singer

Laws and a settled decision procedure to generate them are a good thing. This gives us one important reason for obeying the law. By obeying the law, I can contribute to the respect in which the established decision procedure and the laws are held. By disobeying, I set an example to others that may lead them to disobey too.

~ Peter Singer

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

~ Harshit Walia

With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a spiritualized form of situational ethics and a Christianly submissive statism.

~ Greg L. Bahnsen

Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.

~ Richard Kearney

To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.

~ Peter Singer

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

. . . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

~ Niall Ferguson

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

~ Idries Shah

Give and TakeThe Chief takes less than he is givenAnd gives more than he has taken.

~ Idries Shah

Better to quarrel with a friend than to support enemies.

~ Idries Shah

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

~ Karl Marx

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson's eyes and ask him if it hurts.

~ Ellen Degeneres

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.

~ Aristotle

The word good has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

~ Thomas A. Edison

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. Good is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a common good! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

~ H.l. Mencken

It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.

~ Erich Fromm

I obviously do everything to be hard to understand myself

~ Friedrich Nietzsche