Popular quotes about Ethics! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 11
It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.
Sigmund FreudThere is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
Alain BadiouI understand the chairman of the Senate Ethics comittee is going to examine the check-bouncing scandal with a microscope. ...makes sense... If you're going to look at ethics in Congress, a microscope is what you need.
Jay LenoA minimal level of sportsman ethics afield is mandated by written law. Beyond that, say, when an action is legal but ethically questionable, or when (as Aldo Leopold long ago pointed out) no one is watching, hunter ethics is an individual responsibility. As the existentialists would have it, we determine our own honor minute by minute, action by action, one decision at a time.
David PetersenTo think the welfare and the goodness of the next generations is indeed a good ethics, but there is much greater ethics than this: To think the welfare and the goodness of the current generations, the very people of now! The reason is simple: Future may not exist, it is only a possibility, but the people of now are not possibility, they are here!
Mehmet Murat IldanWe are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.
Dee HockI say I don't believe in love, but that's not really true - love is just the name of an emotion. It's like on steroids. It's lust with ethics.
Tammara WebberA family is not built just by marrying a woman and producing children. Family is built with a timeless sacrifice which must represent purity, unity, standard of ethics, righteousness, grace, dignity, divinity and principles.
Harbhajan Singh YogiI do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies. This does not make sense. The proper guidance during the life of a man should be the weight that he puts upon ethics and the amount of consideration that he has for others.
Albert EinsteinThe more moral the people are in their business dealings, the less paperwork you need, the more handshakes you can have, the more the wheels of capitalism work better because there's trust in the marketplace. Business ethics is not a joke. And, in fact, I think most businesses that I've dealt with encourage exactly that type of behavior.
Rick SantorumWe see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.
Peter SingerI am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign, that a comprehensive and centralised system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.
Archibald Alexander HodgeHence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.
Ayn RandAltruism demands that an individual serve others, but doesnโt stipulate whether those others should be oneโs 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.
Andrew BernsteinSecular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.
Paul KurtzI think Congress has spent enough time on ethics. I think it's time they moved on to something else.
Richard M. NixonOmit a few of the most abstruse sciences, and mankind's study of man occupies nearly the whole field of literature. The burden of history is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology, what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall be.
George FinlaysonAt the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.
Peter SingerOne reason for the decline in moral values is that the world has invented a new, constantly changing and undependable standard of moral conduct referred to as "situational ethics." Now, individuals define good and evil as being adjustable according to each situation; this is in direct contrast to the proclaimed God-given absolute standard: "Thou shalt not!"-as in "Thou shalt not steal".
David B. HaightThe Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man's soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.
Tom ClancyWhile there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics.
Hilary PutnamAs a result of reading science fiction when I was eight, I grew up with an interest in music, architecture, city planning, transportation, politics, ethics, aesthetics on any level, art...it's just total! It's a complete commitment to the whole human race on all the Earth. That's what science fiction is about.
Ray BradburySufism has always had the function of purifying Islamic ethics and that fasting and tazkiya is like lighting a lamp.
Seyyed Hossein NasrThe denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one 'method of ethics'; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned Utilitarianism and the consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic moral philosopher since him.
G. E. M. AnscombeWe don't consider ourselves equal opportunity anythings, because that's not - you know, that's the beauty of fake journalism. We don't have to - we travel in fake ethics.
Jon StewartIt is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
Jacques BarzunThus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.
Christopher DawsonA leader whose speech is prepared by others is not a leader; he is just an empty and stupid bottle! Use your own ideas and your own brain; write your own speech, just like Gandhi, Churchill or Nehru! That is indeed a good ethics and a good honour!
Mehmet Murat IldanOne concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
Jorge Luis BorgesExalt the Cross! God has hung the destiny of the race upon it. Other things we may do in the realm of ethics, and on the lines of philanthropic reforms; but our main duty converges into setting that one glorious beacon of salvation, Calvary's Cross, before the gaze of every immortal soul.
Theodore L. CuylerThe thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.
Joshua FerrisManners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life.... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be.
Emily PostWe never understood the concept of people going onstage and giving anything less than 100 percent. Maybe that's a blue-collar work ethic, but I call it just ethics.
Steven Van ZandtNo man can be a sound lawyer in this land who is not well read in the ethics of Moses and the virtues of Jesus.
Fisher AmesThe Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of such a theocratic ethics, with "Reason" in the place of God. This does not amount to much more than a change of names.
Raymond GeussTo the extent that we hyper-separate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually in order to justify domination, we not only lose the ability to empathise and to see the non-human sphere in ethical terms, but also get a false sense of our own character and location that includes an illusory sense of autonomy. The failure to see the non-human domain in the richer terms appropriate to ethics licences supposedly โpurely instrumentalโ relationships that distort our perceptions and enframings, impoverish our relations and make us insensitive to dependencies and interconnections
Val PlumwoodIn many climbing cultures, it seems that dirty ethics and poor style are acceptable. In mine they are not.
Leo HouldingI suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.
Ursula K. Le Guin