Popular quotes about Ethics! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to it. If I want others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see however strange it may be to mine. Ethics in our western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relation of man to man... but that is a limited ethics.
Albert SchweitzerTo be more precise, it's ethics and liberation, and as a consequence there is an ethics of liberation.
Tariq RamadanKant's description of most ethical duties reads more like a description of moral virtues and vices. Once we see this, we see that Kantian ethics is indeed a kind of virtue ethics, and that it does not "divide the heart from the head" (to anticipate one of your later questions) but instead recognizes the deep truth that reason and emotion are not opposites.
Allen W. WoodWe have a whole lot of the president-elect's nominees that have not filled out their ethics disclosures. I can never remember a time when anybody was voted on for a Cabinet position who hadn't completed their ethics report, and certainly nobody should be allowed to vote until that's done.
Patrick LeahyFaith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment. . . . And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good. . . . This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.
Sam HarrisMost people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.
Cathy O'NeilThe 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 SimpsonEthics without virtue is an illusion. What is the highest purpose of ethics? It is to make a person good, that is virtuous.
Peter KreeftChristian 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.
Gordon FeeEvery child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact
Bill DraytonA US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools.
William Z. FosterWe 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 SingerThe ethics of excellence requires a sense of perspective. Look at the big picture. If you live for the moment you might mortgage the future? What happens if you put your reputation at risk and lose the bet?
Price PritchettI am not robbed by people who have more money than me. I am robbed by a government that wants to penalize my industry and give increasing portions of what I earn to people who do not emulate my principles, morals and ethics.
Cal ThomasIntegrity, probity, ethics and transparency is needed but most important is the culture of discipline
Vinod RaiMy personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.
Arthur KeithEthics are complete, profound and alive only when addressed to all living beings. Only then are we in spiritual connection with the world. Any philosophy not representing this, not based on the indefinite totality of life, is bound to disappear.
Albert SchweitzerThere is no moral absolute, and this leads us to situational ethics, which unfortunately is being taught in public schools all over America. This means that right and wrong is dependent upon the circumstances.
Ted CruzTo me, God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality: God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience... He is a personal God to those who need His personal presence. He is embodied to those who need His touch. He is the purest essence. He simply is to those who have faith. He is all things to all men.
Mahatma GandhiI am closer to a European viewpoint of the world than an American one. My ethics and ideals are based on European concepts.
Bianca JaggerOf learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
H. L. MenckenPeople who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.
Simon BlackburnFor some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was our only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to my way of thinking.
Freeman DysonChange can only come from local citizens and politicians - it cannot be imposed by well-meaning foreigners - not least because a society like Afghanistan or Iraq is suspicious of outsiders and often resistant to change. I am not going to get drawn into the ethics of intervening in other countries. My concern is the practical question. Can you actually achieve change in this way? My guess is we can stop wars sometimes as in the Balkans and topple regimes - but that the other stuff - such as corruption is not within our power to effect and alter.
Rory StewartIn our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense. What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others' happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others' happiness.
Dalai LamaLet me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.
Albert SchweitzerBut when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence.
Price PritchettWhile 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 PutnamI have faith, as I did when I announced my stem-cell decision in 2001, that science and ethics can coexist.
George W. BushSocialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.
Friedrich August von HayekChristianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion.
Austin PhelpsApart 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.
Ratan TataEthics or simple honesty is the building blocks upon which our whole society is based, and business is a part of our society, and it's integral to the practice of being able to conduct business, that you have a set of honest standards. And it's much easier to do business with someone when you look them in the eye and say, "This is what we're going to do," and you understand what you each mean, and you can go away and get it done.
Kerry StokesI have no hang-ups in life. I don't care about groups and camps. I have been brought up with certain values and ethics. I have never been egoistic about my stardom and lineage. I don't have any qualms about breaking the ice with my colleagues. I can walk up to any actor and greet him, irrespective of what kind of equation I share with him.
Abhishek BachchanPhilosophers don't all believe that ethics is just based on intuition. That's just stupid! It's ignoramus!
Marjorie GreneI know people are really interested in everything that the celebrities are doing, even if you don't consider yourself a "celebrity." What always would drive me crazy is - I took ethics classes in college - and it always amazes me how there would blatantly be something that I did not say in quotation marks. If you're putting quotation marks around it, it better be exactly what that person said.
Carrie UnderwoodKant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances.
Allen W. WoodThe great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach.
Albert SchweitzerJesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.
Richard Dawkins