Popular quotes about Ethics! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
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.
Charlotte Perkins GilmanChoice 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.
Margaret ThatcherMy view of ethics and of its priority is connected to my view that we are fundamentally relational beings - both the product of human interactions, as well as committed as part of the expression of our own humanity to various social involvements. I see ethics as having two places in the maintenance of these relational activities - first as providing the basic coinage of our interactions qua humans and second as mediating the various roles we assume as humans.
John KleinigThe principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.
Friedrich August von HayekI 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 LenoI'm somewhat antagonistic towards these various projects that charge $250,000 per person for the ability to be weightless for 3 minutes after being brought up from earth. I think there are such better uses for that money that i seriously question the ethics of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on space flights for extremely wealthy people.
Arthur FrommerThe focus of environmental ethics should indeed be on the virtues and how these inform our relationship to natural environments.
David E. CooperWe 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 editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and 80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.
Roger MuddI am fully aware that everybody has a right to succeed, and success should be with ethics.
Sharad PawarThe head of the government ethics ought to be careful, because that person is becoming extremely political. Apparently, may have made a - publicly supported Hillary Clinton as calling out the president with information on Twitter about our disentangle - disentangling of the business over a month ago.
Reince PriebusI 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 CenaI would never stay in office against the will of the people. My ethics and patriotism do not allow me to do so.
Abdel Fattah el-SisiFor 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 DysonThe rejection of all abstract formalism. Materialism reminds every science of its real source: the world men transform. No science can, whether in its history or its object, grasp its own origins within itself or constitute itself as a closed world, exhaustively defined by internal rules. Materialism refers every science and every activity to the reality they depend on, even if this dependence is masked by a great many abstract mediations: mathematics as well as logic, aesthetics as well as ethics and politics.
Louis AlthusserWhat little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.
John Stuart MillCommon 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 ChejfecIn ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.
Philip KitcherThe question is where are business ethics and morality if one of the parties wants to dishonor a binding contract, just because in retrospect it realizes it could perhaps have got a better price!
Anil AmbaniChristianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion.
Austin PhelpsYou do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
John Perry BarlowThe 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 ThoreauEthics is not for wimps. It's not easy being a good person. That's why it's such a lofty goal and an admirable achievement
Michael JosephsonI don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him.
Robert A. HeinleinNo one can learn tolerance in a climate of irresponsibility, which does not produce democracy. The act of tolerating requires a climate in which limits may be established, in which there are principles to be respected. That is why tolerance is not coexistence with the intolerable. Under an authoritarian regime, in which authority is abused, or a permissive one, in which freedom is not limited, one can hardly learn tolerance. Tolerance requires respect, discipline, and ethics.
Paulo FreireThe hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
Jose Ortega y GassetTrue knowledge is that which establishes harmony and synthesis between ience on the one hand and spirituality and ethics on the other.
Sai BabaI 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.
Julian BagginiMy ethics are basically around animals. I cannot do animals in distress. I was able to shut myself off with humans, and in a strange way, if you go through violence, you come out stronger at the other end than what you went in.
Harry BensonWe should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille Pagliaphotographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.
Susan Sontag[Donald Trump] has done a financial disclosure, which has gone through the Office of Government Ethics. I think he's done that twice. That is his duty under the law. I hear no complaints about that.
Jason ChaffetzI 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.
Peter SingerThe demands of the science, of the ethics and of the reason are superior to the demands of the people!
Mehmet Murat IldanAgnosticism 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 BatchelorIf you want to find out how strong a company's ethics are, don't listen to what its people say, watch what they do.
Elizabeth WarrenIt should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Nathaniel BorensteinIt is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
Salman RushdieWe maintain, and have said in the Ethics, if the arguments there adduced are of any value, that happiness is the realization and perfect exercise of virtue, and this not conditional, but absolute. And I used the term 'conditional' to express that which is indispensable, and 'absolute' to express that which is good in itself.
AristotleI 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 GuinIt is the teaching of the Bible and of sound Political ethics that the education of children belongs to the sphere of the family and is the duty of the parents. The theory that the children of the Commonwealth are the charge of the Commonwealth is a pagan one, derived from heathen Sparta and Platoรญs heathen republic, and connected by regular, logical sequence with legalized prostitution and the dissolution of the conjugal tie.
Robert Dabney'Our parents' generation had it a lot tougher than we did. They had to live through the Depression, World War II, and then they had to, you know, try to pick up the pieces of their lives and bring up their children. And, it was a great example for us. I guess we grew up with a certain amount of the ethics our parents had, which is, you know: work hard, make your own way, be independent.
Billy Joel