Popular quotes about Ethics! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
The meaning that we are seeking in evolution is its meaning to us, to man. The ethics of evolution must be human ethics. It is one of the many unique qualities of man, the new sort of animal, that he is the only ethical animal. The ethical need and its fulfillment are also products of evolution, but they have been produced in man alone.
George Gaylord SimpsonOne of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns-about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering-in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith.
Sam HarrisI 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 first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.
Albert SchweitzerEthics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Albert SchweitzerI think of myself as being an ethical man, but I don't try to teach ethics. I have no message. I know little about contemporary life. I don't read a newspaper. I dislike politics and politicians. I belong to no party whatever. My private life is a private life. I try to avoid photography and publicity.
Jorge Luis BorgesExistentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
Simone de BeauvoirWhat 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.
Oscar WildeWe hear a lot of talk these days about teaching values in higher education. Frankly, I am not sure this can be accomplished through a separate course in morality or ethics. I am convinced, however, that values are sustained on campus by the honesty of our words, and by the confidence we have in the words of others.
Ernest L. BoyerToo often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics classโor worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.
Francine ProseYou cannot advocate decency and ethics, you must design the conditions that eliminate the problems. In scarcity, people will tend to steal. If you make things available, people tend not to steal.
Jacque FrescoWe need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.
Dalai LamaI admire the military. I guess in a world of villains and heroes, they're my heroes. Their dedication, their commitment, their discipline, their code of ethics.
John CenaOmit 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 FinlaysonAs we enter into the 110th Congress, it is imperative that we address ethics reforms needed to make this institution run correctly.
Jo Ann DavisWhile we are guarding the country, we must accept being the guardian of the finest ethics. The country needs it and we must do it.
Creighton W. Abrams, Jr.Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.
Bill MoyersHistory 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.
B. R. AmbedkarAt 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 Singer[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.
William JamesJournalists are divided into two groups: those who live by ethics, and those who don't.
Manfred GerstenfeldIn my time, we served with noble and ethical leaders: Gerry Ford, Bob Michael, John Rhodes, men of impeccable honesty. We didn't have anybody locked up for a violation of ethics.
Pete McCloskeyCommon sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.
Thomas NagelWe can speak of politics, ethics, and in this way, speak about the world. But at the same time, it's always in a way that is totally nebulous and abstracted, this way of thinking about reality. And that's why I write the way I do - it's an almost immortal way to show dependence on the biological, the political, the moral parts of us. I say immortal because we now have to find new formats, new eloquences, and resolve within ourselves this "constructed" life, a life that is incomplete, imperfect.
Sergio ChejfecThus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.
Christopher DawsonThe true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics,--we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom.
Henry David ThoreauHere's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.
Tony KushnerThe science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
William JamesNo 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 AmesInterest 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.
Peter SingerThe question is, when so many others cut corners, shave the truth, self-deal, believe in the fast buck, and follow the crowd along the low road of least resistance, can we even afford to travel the high road of ethical behavior? Frankly, we can't afford anything else. Any other competitive angle is a pure crapshoot in today's business world. Companies with shaky ethics and shabby standards will be crippled as they try to compete in our changing world.
Price PritchettHe who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics.
Henry David ThoreauWhat I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it โ that's in the first reader for squares โ is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.
Ernest HemingwayAgnosticism 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.
Stephen BatchelorTo 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 HouldingReligion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy.
Timothy WinterIn a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.
Naomi KleinWe have also set up the national institute for ethics. This institute and also the implementation of the national integrity plan, that will certainly do the follow up that is necessary for this.
Abdullah Ahmad BadawiThe lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart - and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.
Clarence Darrow