Ethics Quotes

It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.

~ Alain Badiou

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.

~ Richard Kearney

It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out.

~ John Stuart Mill

We often confuse determination with its evil twin: fixation. While determination is our ability to stand our ground while pursuing our goals. Fixation, on the other hand, is an unhealthy attachment to an ideal.

~ Venugopal Gupta

Face the complexity involved in making ethical choices.

~ Linda Fisher Thornton

It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

~ Jacob Needleman

He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante's Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man's unvarnished verdict of himself?

~ Irving Stone

Good intentions are good netiquette. A conscious effort to be nice others on the internet. NetworkEtiquette.net

~ David Chiles

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?

~ Jaron Lanier

Because we are a globally connected village, we need to remember that our choices are not isolated. They have a powerful ripple effect, and that ripple is global.

~ Linda Fisher Thornton

The reason why she had chosen journalism was because of those who had done so before her. Stalwart women and men who reported stories in the days before the Internet. Before it was fashionable to learn Mass Communication. A long time before being a TV reporter and calling up your family to see your face beamed to their homes was an in thing. They were those who had left their families behind as they pursued the truth, opting to go to jail when the government hounded them to reveal their sources. Men and women that would rather quit than write editorials the management wanted them to write. Journalists who never wrote a word they would have to disown. Journalists who took their last breath as they wrote an article was true to what they believed in. They would never sit down and take stock of the stories they had covered and written saying, “So what if twenty of these are non-stories, I at least had five I believed in.

~ Shweta Ganesh Kumar

With nature on your side, you don’t need numbers, you don’t need financing and you certainly don’t need to make friends with people you should be fightingagainst.

~ Christopher Rankin

Socialism is politicized envy.

~ Rousas John Rushdoony

Sol wanted to know how any ethical system – much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it – could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son. It did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last moment. It did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove Sol into fits of fury.

~ Dan Simmons

I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone…I didn’t ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else.

~ Steve Wozniak

In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

~ Max Weber

Leadership responsibility is multidimensional and cannot be described in one or two words. It is personal, interpersonal, environmental and societal.

~ Linda Fisher Thornton

No, this isn't right. I don't think the people doing it know or care about right and wrong. This is all some kind of show, but I don't understand it either.

~ J.z. Colby

Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There’s no longer a need for the social construct of religion.

~ David G. Mcafee

The difficulty was not that of following a moral principle at personal cost; the difficulty was that of knowing what to do when there is more than one principal, and when the principles clash.

~ Elton Trueblood

He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry.WHY, Captain? he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. I would have the the real question was WHY NOT?

~ Imogen Howson

He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry.WHY, Captain? he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. I would have thought the the real question was WHY NOT?

~ Imogen Howson

Swag is my ethic, s/o to my bitches

~ Joe Prophet

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.

~ Rebecca Skloot

If you can’t see the feelings in a donkey, a ship, or a delicate tool, then it’s just as easy to not see them in your brother or sister when you can profit by treating them badly.

~ J.z. Colby

If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.

~ Plato

Karna is a good man, but he sees good even in what is bad. His seeing it as good doesn't make the bad good, but makes his goodness look bad.

~ Kavita Kané

I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there's really no hope for you.

~ Joe Hill

if ethics is not the engine of success, in the train of growth, it sure is a guard, with a flag, which may be green, or at times red

~ Priyavrat Thareja

While mistakes may be local, in today’s connected world embarrassment is global

~ Gyan Nagpal

I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.

~ William Lane Craig

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.

~ Henry Kravis

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life, I should not be honest otherwise.

~ George Santayana

Everything good is good because of the love it contains.

~ John K. Brown

5:3 Do Not Wither within Your Area of Expertise...But the lawyer must not allow the client to make a decision that the lawyer believes is wrong without a forceful and effective presentation by the lawyer of his or her position on the subject. When the matter is within the sphere of the lawyer's expertise, the lawyer must not permit the fear of being wrong to devour the lawyer's obligation to urge a course of action which the lawyer believes to be the best. (p.58)

~ Peter Siviglia

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.

~ William Lane Craig