Quotes About Ethics

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

Ethics has not only to do with mankind but with the animal creation as well. This is witnessed in the purpose of St. Francis of Assisi. Thus we shall arrive that ethics is reverence for all life. This is the ethic of love widened universally. It is the ethic of Jesus now recognized as a necessity of thought...Only a universal ethic which embraces every living creature can put us in touch with the universe and the will which is there manifest.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

A code of ethics cannot be developed overnight by edict or official pronouncement. It is developed by years of practice and performance of duty according to high ethical standards. It must be self-policing. Without such a code, a professional soldier or a group soon loses identity and effectiveness. Once we know our job, have a genuine code of ethics, and maintain unquestioned personal integrity, we have met the first and most demanding challenge of leadership.

Ethics without virtue is an illusion. What is the highest purpose of ethics? It is to make a person good, that is virtuous.

Christian ethics is not primarily an individualistic, one-on-one-with-God brand of personal holiness; rather it has to do with living the life of the Spirit in Christian community and in the world.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

I'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.

Grace is the essence of theology and gratitude is the essence of ethics.

Though we think intrinsic desires tend to be pretty stable, we do not think they imply anything like the amount of predictability in behavior that traditional virtue ethics requires for someone to have a one-word-in-English character trait such as "benevolence". Other things being equal, a person with more of a desire for other people's wellbeing will do more for other people's wellbeing, but things are almost never equal.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

Control is not leadership; management is not leadership; leadership is leadership is leadership. If you seek to lead, invest at least 50% of your time leading yourself-your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct. Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you and 15% leading your peers. If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.

I think Kenny Chesney or Garth Brooks would be the coolest duet partners. I look up to them so much for their work ethics.

Ethics and religion must not stay at home when we go to work.

Love is the essence of all religion, mysticism, and philosophy, and for the one who has learned this, love fulfills the purpose of religion, ethics, and philosophy, and the lover is raised above all diversities of faiths and beliefs.

Economics and ethics have little in common.

Donald Trump may undermine some of the traditional checks on the presidency: the press in particular, but also the various government and Congressional ethics bodies, as well as the career civil service.

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.

Omit 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.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.

In contemporary society secular humanism has been singled out by critics and proponents alike as a position sharply distinguishable from any religious formulation. Religious fundamentalists in the United States have waged a campaign against secular humanism, claiming that it is a rival "religion" and seeking to root it out from American public life. Secular 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.

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.

Common 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.

You can't feel the need to be liked in public life, because if you do you will compromise the principles that are so important to the public having confidence in your ethics and integrity.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.

Renunciation is the very basis upon which ethics stands.

Sudan replaced the U.S. on the U.N. Human Rights Commission joining Syria, and Cuba. So now, the commission members have no interest in upholding the stated mission of the panel. It's just like the Senate Ethics Committee.

When you see your fellow religious man, don't call him brother; but when you see a man of honour, a man of goodness, a man of peace, a man of ethics, now you can call him as your brother!

So the next thing I assume I'll be hearing from Republicans, they want to change rules some way, as they do on the House when you get a problem with ethics, they just change the rules.

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.

The Bible contains legendary, historical, and ethical contents. It is quite possible to consider them separately, and one doesn't have to accept the legends in order to get the ethics. Fundamentalists make a grave mistake to insist on the letter of the writings, because they drive away many who can't swallow the Adam-and-Eve bit.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

The 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.

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.

Human beings of all societies in all periods of history believe that their ideas on the nature of the real world are the most secure, and that their ideas on religion, ethics and justice are the most enlightened. Like us, they think that final knowledge is at last within reach. Like us, they pity the people in earlier ages for not knowing the true facts. Unfailingly, human beings pity their ancestors for being so ignorant and forget that their descendants will pity them for the same reason.

There's a floating distraction in the contemporary world, life at a distance enabled by technology. I want people to commit at the level of their subjectivity. The idea of subjective commitment is at the core of ethics, something that divides the self from itself. I become an ethical self. I cannot meet that ideal, I cannot fulfill it, it divides me from myself and it makes me strive harder. This ideal subjective ethical drive is at the heart of an absolutely earnest, radical politics that insists that people will be able to engage with each other, and they're lifted from irony at that point.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

Philosophers don't all believe that ethics is just based on intuition. That's just stupid! It's ignoramus!

Doing the right thing doesn't always bring success. But compromising ethics almost always leads to failure.

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism ... for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.

In many climbing cultures, it seems that dirty ethics and poor style are acceptable. In mine they are not.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.