Ethical Life Quotes

#1. The ethical life ... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society ... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

Roger Scruton

#2. Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.

Roger Scruton

#3. Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

Peter Singer

#4. Jews bear children not only because the carnal election of Abraham must continue. For Jews, raising children is essential to living a rounded ethical life.

Meir Soloveichik

#5. If we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots. ... If we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little.

Peter Singer

#6. I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.

Michael J. Fox

#7. It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding.

Terence McKenna

#8. When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.

Philip Kitcher

#9. There is nothing in the way of amelioration of the conditions of life, of politics, of social and ethical matters, that may not be affected through the skilful application of those principles of advertising that, in business, have proved to be so wonderfully effective.

George Arthur French

#10. Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

Jodi Picoult

#11. An ethical, high quality, student centered, outcomes driven, affordable education for the benefit of our fellow citizens seeking a better life by means of gainful employment from career focused education and training.

David J. Waldron

#12. After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Dan Simmons

#13. We don't need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.

Sharon Salzberg

#14. Through the Reformation, the mechanical relation of nature and grace was superceded by an ethical one, so that the restoration of the law of God in every sphere of life became the concern of the believer.

Henry R. Van Til

#15. Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#16. Today, more than ever, citizens demand with good reason that moral and ethical principles be upheld and that exemplariness preside over our public life. And the king, as the head of state, must not only be an example but also a servant to that just and legitimate demand of the citizens.

King Felipe VI

#17. I think 'vegan' is a beautiful word. It is more than just a description for our diet. I see it as a visible template for an ethical, healthy, responsible, and rational life. Because it describes our character, it says we do not take the life of another living being to satisfy our wants.

Philip Wollen

#18. If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government,

Peter Singer

#19. You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.

David Kudler

#20. I now believe that people are bustards with no ethics. It would be better for them to admit it and build their communal life on that admission. The new ethical issue becomes how to maintain public welfare and human happiness in a society of bustards and scum

Naguib Mahfouz

#21. genuine relationships are always the best place to start as we seek to integrate our ethical views in the daily life of ministry.

Preston Sprinkle

#22. We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life.

Jimmy Carter

#23. To the truly ethical man, all of life is sacred, including forms of life that from the human point of view may seem lower than ours.

Albert Schweitzer

#24. There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

Stephen Fry

#25. Some things transcend politics and policy and the lust for power. Truth, honesty, integrity, decency and fairness are immutable values. They are the ethical substance of life. They ought to be cherished. To sell them out is to sell one's soul.

Michael Short

#26. Integrity, a firm adherence to the highest moral and ethical standards, is essential to the life of a true Latter-day Saint.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

#27. A slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you. - The Ethical Slut

Nikki Sex

#28. In short, bioethics investigates ethical issues arising in the life sciences (medicine, health care, genetics, biology, research, etc) by applying the principles and methods of moral philosophy to these problems.

Adele Langlois

#29. The first principle of ethical power is Purpose. By purpose, I don't mean your objective or intention-something toward which you are always striving. Purpose is something bigger. It is the picture you have of yourself-the kind of person you want to be or the kind of life you want to lead.

Stephen Covey

#30. Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of a good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.

Pierre De Coubertin

#31. The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world.

Stanislav Grof

#32. Science is important, but so is ethics, so is balancing life. To destroy life to save life - it's one of the real ethical dilemmas that we face.

George W. Bush

#33. Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor.

Rosi Braidotti

#34. Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.

Herbert Spencer

#35. John Frame's magnificent work on the Christian life fully endorses the authority of Scripture and practically addresses the need to consider the situations and people involved in ethical decisions.

Richard L. Pratt Jr.

#36. I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

Kenneth Langone

#37. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.

Paul Brunton

#38. Now, more than any time previous in human history, we must arm ourselves with an ethical code so that each of us will be aware that he is protecting the moral merchandise absent of which life is not worth living.

Sholem Asch

#39. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

Albert Schweitzer

#40. The ethical argument regarding abortion hinges on the question of when life begins. Some believe life begins at forty.

Kevin Nealon

#41. Man is an animal with primary instincts of survival. Consequently his ingenuity has developed first and his soul afterwards. The progress of science is far ahead of man's ethical behavior.

Charlie Chaplin

#42. If you're the type of person who wants to associate exclusively with those who perfectly mirror your own ethical worldview, you're reducing significantly the scope of your potential life experience.

Chuck Klosterman

#43. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

Carl Jung

#44. Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.

Pope Francis

#45. Our attitudes and personal values create outcomes. The consequence of any venture shapes our evolving ethical precepts, and the product of a sundry of worldly experiences in turn establishes our personality.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#46. The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth.

Bell Hooks

#47. As Lizzie had seen so many times with victims, the harder your life had been, the harder it was to give yourself room for ethical choices. So were born cycles of abuse.

Paul Cornell

#48. One doesn't begin to be a Christian because of an ethical decision or a great idea, but rather because of an encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives new horizons to life, and with that, a decisive orientation.

Pope Benedict XVI

#49. There's ilegal with ethical and there is legal with un-ethical.

Vhalsky

#50. Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#51. Olympism is a philosophy which, by blending sport with culture, seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal ethical principles.

Juan Antonio Samaranch

#52. I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.

Jack London

#53. There's an ethical dimension to my life and all of our lives, from the time we get up in the morning to the time we sleep, including what we sleep on. So I don't separate my choices from ethical choices at any time.

Dennis Kucinich

#54. He [Jesus] was the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I've ever encountered in my life or in my reading. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world ...

Charles Templeton

#55. We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction.

Klaus Schwab

#56. I am interested and deeply curious about our need for a spiritual life, a life of greater meaning, and how we come to a more ethical view of life within our communities that is more inclusive than exclusive, one that is extended even beyond our own species.

Terry Tempest Williams

#57. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Albert Schweitzer

#58. In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

Jorge Paulo Lemann

#59. It's all about trying to make the world and the universe a better place. I'm proud to be connected with it. I think we need that in our lives. We need ethical, heroic people trying to do the right thing to help others and to improve life on this planet and in the universe.

Leonard Nimoy

#60. Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner.

Jodi Picoult

#61. Stem cell research must be carried out in an ethical manner in a way that respects the sanctity of human life.

John Boehner

#62. A dog can bite you but you must not bite the dog! Your every movement in life must be peaceful; otherwise you lose your ethical superiority! Nonviolent civil disobedience is a genius; no power can beat it; use it when necessary!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#63. Life is not about getting everything right, as much as it's about working to live right.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#64. The cross does not give us a minor shift or two with regard to a few of our ethical and moral and religious values. The cross radically disrupts the very center and citadel of your life from self to Christ. And if the cross has not done that, you're not a Christian!

Albert Martin

#65. If I do eat meat, it's got to be ethical. I want to know that it lived a great life before it was killed humanely.

Ricky Gervais

#66. I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.

Temple Grandin

#67. My own ongoing research among secular Americans-as well as that of a handful of other social scientists who have only recently turned their gaze on secular culture-confirms that nonreligious family life is replete with its own sustaining moral values and enriching ethical precepts.

Phil Zuckerman

#68. Ethical knowledge is the emplotment of one's life in the theological narrative

James K.A. Smith

#69. I think my uncle was probably the biggest influence in my life. We grew up in the same house, and he was just a really great, hard-working, honest, ethical person.

Catherine Bell

#70. Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.

Friedrich Schleiermacher