Popular quotes about Ethics! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
My 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 KleinigTo 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. WoodCorporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics and that there are no easy shortcuts to success. Their companies need ethics carefully sewn into their fabric.
Vivek WadhwaThought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless ethic and must be resolved not to veil from humankind the conflicts which this ethic will involve us, but allow us really to experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation this is the difficult task which confronts our age.
Albert SchweitzerWe are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.
Dee HockThe 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 MuddAltruism demands that an individual serve others, but doesnโt stipulate whether those others should be oneโs family, or the homeless, or society as a whole. Collectivism states that, in politics, society comes first and the individual must obey. Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics.
Andrew BernsteinIt seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
Zadie SmithIf we ought not to fear mortal truth, still less should we dread scientific truth. In the first place it can not conflict with ethics? But if science is feared, it is above all because it can give no happiness? Man, then, can not be happy through science but today he can much less be happy without it.
Henri PoincareThe only way we can develop muscle is through regular exercise. As soon as we stop stretching and working toward higher ethics, our standards start to sag. The muscle gets soft, and instead of excellence we have to settle for mediocrity. Maybe something even worse.
Price PritchettAnimal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.
Peter SingerPoliticians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.
George R. R. MartinWhile 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.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.
Thomas A. EdisonThe 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.
Albert SchweitzerTo become a lawyer you must discard your ethics and become an eloquent devil that views justice as god.
Kane MorganThe denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one 'method of ethics'; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned Utilitarianism and the consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic moral philosopher since him.
G. E. M. AnscombeWe don't consider ourselves equal opportunity anythings, because that's not - you know, that's the beauty of fake journalism. We don't have to - we travel in fake ethics.
Jon StewartMysticism has often been misunderstood as the attempt to escape this simple, phenomenal world to a more pure existence in heaven beyond. This is not mysticism, but Gnosticism. Biblical mysticism is the attempt to exit 'this world' to an alternative reality that pervades the old order. Its goal is to jettison the mind-set that says 'greed is good,' selfishness is normal,' and 'killing is necessary.' Mysticism in biblical terms is not escapism, as so many have caricatured it, but a fight for ethics and social change.
Walter WinkThe 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 KushnerA way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life.
Michel FoucaultMy 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 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.
Steven Van ZandtThere'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.
Simon CritchleyThe Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of such a theocratic ethics, with "Reason" in the place of God. This does not amount to much more than a change of names.
Raymond GeussThe basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.
Stanley HauerwasSocrates claimed famously that one never loses by doing the right thing. Stephen Post and his contributors claim, a little less boldly, that at least the generous will, probably, stay healthyโand, improving on Socrates, they support this claim with careful empirical science, impressive for its comprehensive detail. Here ethics and religion join science and enjoin us to be more caring and healthy. A seminal work, with an urgent message.
Holmes Rolston IIIPhilosophers don't all believe that ethics is just based on intuition. That's just stupid! It's ignoramus!
Marjorie GreneEthics evolve naturally, and we trample upon them with laws created by reason and experience.
Winston ChurchillA historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.
Ai WeiweiCan you avoid knowledge? You cannot! Can you avoid technology? You cannot! Things are going to go ahead in spite of ethics, in spite of your personal beliefs, in spite of everything.
Jose Manuel Rodriguez DelgadoAs for money and prestige, if one has an opportunity to make money and/or advance their position or place in life there can be a lot to weigh and consider, such as responsibilities, goals and objectives etc. We all make choices, deal with our sense of priorities, principles, ethics, morals, balancing, juggling, making compromises... or not! Ha!
Axl RoseWhat is more likely? That tomorrow will be called 'Thursday' or that Maxine Waters will play the race card in her ethics investigation?
JonahBecause ethics is fundamentally about questioning the ends, the goals and aims of our actions, we must come back to the rules and ask why. So we must return to the philosophy of law, the raison d'etre and the point of what we're asked to do. It's not easy, it's very demanding and it needs intellectual courage.
Tariq RamadanI do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
Albert EinsteinIt is in everybody's interest to seek those [actions] that lead to happiness and avoid those which lead to suffering. And because our interests are inextricably linked, we are compelled to accept ethics as the indispensable interface between my desire to be happy and yours.
Dalai LamaEthics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.
Potter StewartThere are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.
Carl Friedrich Gauss... the self respect of individuals ought to make them demand of their leaders conformity with an agreed-upon code of ethics and moral conduct.
Mary Barnett Gilson