Quotes About Ethics

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God's Word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people.

Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

I 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.

Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics.

More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

When you hold out for high standards, people are impressed-but they don't always like you for it. Not everybody will be on your side in your struggle to do what's right and ethical. In fact, sometimes even you won't be on your side. You'll wrestle with inner conflict, torn between what you should do and what you want to do. You'll also aggravate other people. Seems when you walk the straight and narrow you always step on someone's toes. Don't count on the ethics of excellence to make you popular.

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

In professions where the criteria of professionalism, expertise, good manners and ethics apply, the gender aspect, i.e., whether a person is a man or woman, is not relevant at all. What is important is that citizens' confidence in politicians and the politics is strong enough to make politicians proud of their profession.

We 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.

For me, the value of a climb is the sum of three inseparable elements, all equally important: aesthetics, history, and ethics. Together they form the whole basis of my concept of alpinism. Some people see no more in climbing mountains than an escape from the harsh realities of modern times. This is not only uninformed but unfair. I don’t deny that there can be an element of escapism in mountaineering, but this should never overshadow its real essence, which is not escape but victory over your own human frailty.

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

Hence 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.

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.

I am fully aware that everybody has a right to succeed, and success should be with ethics.

When the study of the household (ecology) and the management of the household (economics) can be merged, and when ethics can be extended to include environmental as well as human values, then we can be optimistic about the future of humankind. Accordingly, bringing together these three ‘E's' is the ultimate holism and the great challenge for our future.

Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.

Discontent is the seed of ethics.

Living up to your commitments is part of business ethics. My word is my bond.

Work ethics eliminates fear.

Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.

Self-restraint is the very keystone of the ethics of vow-taking.

Sufis have always been those that have tried to purify the ethics of Islam and society. And they don't have their hands cut off from the external action at all. For example, the bazaar in which the Sufis were very strong always dominated economic life in Islamic world. They could give a much more sane and Islamic form of activity when the economic life of Islam moved out of the bazaar to new parts of Islamic cities with modernized Muslims, who took it in another light and it became very, very anti Islamic, and much against many of the most profound practices of Islamic societies.

Ethics is not about the way things are, it is about the way things ought to be.

There is no spirituality without ethics

The Prime Minister, a specialist in calling in the locksmith after the horses had fled - the whole herd in fact - and the barn in ruins, ended the week with a great raft of ethics proposals for cabinet, leadership candidates, backbenchers and lobbyists. I think it is more than fair to ask: Why wait for the middle of his third term to institute what the public would have welcomed at the beginning of his first?

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.

Ethics is doing more than the law requires and less than the law allows.

For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim "never say never" is one of the most important in ethics.

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.

One 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".

Colleges don't teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another.

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.

The jury had down right contempt for punk rock grass roots ethics.

Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ."...and ..."The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication, distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories, however, make us all losers.

We need to challenge the dominant culture: by ethics, principles and values.

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.

I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

We 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.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

Interest in business ethics courses has surged, and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long-term social values.

There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.

Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.

I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can.