Top 100 Ethics Philosophy Quotes
#1. Just as we will spend large sums to preserve cities like Venice, even though future generations conceivably may not be interested in such architectural treasures, so we should preserve wilderness even though it is possible that future generations will care little for it.
Peter Singer
#2. This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Dalai Lama XIV
#3. No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
Albert Camus
#4. So, at any rate, it appears. But appearance is not reality.
Gordon Graham
#5. I am not a wishing well with legs.
(Paraphrasing Babylon 5's Londo Mollari, repeately, when asked to perform hacking functions for strangers.)
Adrian Lamo
#6. Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning ...
Peter Singer
#7. There are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, 'it is not owing to me, it is owing to the year.' In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying, 'it was not I, it was the weapon?
Mencius
#9. ...if good is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such definition.
G.E. Moore
#10. The greatest ethical test that we're ever going to face is the treatment of those who are at our mercy.
Lyn White
#11. Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.
Nancy Pearcey
#12. No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn.
Steven Pinker
#13. My personal philosophy of life is one of ethics.
Alva Myrdal
#14. Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only 'Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?' Where you cannot it is to be rejected...
Immanuel Kant
#16. I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
#17. To recognize untruth as a condition of life
that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them.
G.E. Moore
#19. In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself?
Orhan Pamuk
#20. It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. ( ... ) The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman.
Milan Kundera
#21. Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#22. Bobbing and weaving are methods and maneuvers by which we bend ethics, water down morals, and parse down values to serve our agendas.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#23. The 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 Geuss
#24. 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
#25. The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.
Stefan Molyneux
#26. I don't know the ethics, but some times sex is at highest priority in a relationship.
Nikhil Yadav
#27. There are already plenty of people who will take a firm stand on the need to be competely impartial between right and wrong.
Martin Cohen
#28. It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.
Marcus Aurelius
#29. Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face.
Stefan Molyneux
#30. Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
Vaclav Havel
#31. We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.
G.E. Moore
#32. Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal...
G.E. Moore
#33. The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
Sam Harris
#34. Freemasonry embraces the highest moral laws and will bear the test of
any system of ethics or philosophy ever promulgated for the uplift of man.
Douglas MacArthur
#36. Men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man.
Baruch Spinoza
#37. I have gained this by philosophy ... I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.
Aristotle.
#38. Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.
John Rawls
#39. In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it.
Leon R. Kass
#40. Man cannot bear to be in the wrong. As soon as he feels guilt or remorse, he bends his ethics to suit himself. Actions do not flow from ethics, but ethics from actions, and it is by refining our actions that we refine our ethics.
Neel Burton
#41. ...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.
G.E. Moore
#42. I have an ethics background. It doesn't mean you're perfect. But I tried to set an entirely different bar for politics in D.C. that's based on ethics and first principles and political philosophy, and not this constant bickering of, 'Are you Right or Left?'
Dave Brat
#43. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.
Aristotle.
#44. True morals are a priceless thing that possesses the highest value and can never be bought or sold at any cost.
Abigail Landsbrook
#45. Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.
William James
#46. Morality he found amusing, in the obscure way that only a man with a Ph.D. in philosophy could find such things amusing, but justice and ethics were inflexible measures, applicable to all, and not to be joked about.
Charlie Huston
#47. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
Epictetus
#48. If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?
K.L. Toth
#49. Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.
Peter Singer
#50. [W]e must start from somewhere in current folk morality, otherwise we start from somewhere unintuitive, and that can hardly be a good place to start
Frank Jackson
#51. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.
Steven Pinker
#53. I don't want to become like him. Become one of those people who believe it's okay to do anything to anyone if it achieves the 'right' end.
Lisa M. Lilly
#54. Evil ethicists are the holocaust of humanity; if philosophy can be the instant sunlight to their endless vampirism, it will save more lives than all the doctors who have ever lived.
Stefan Molyneux
#55. If indeed good were a feeling....then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if do, then good cannot itself be identical with any feeling.
G.E. Moore
#56. Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
Carl Sagan
#57. People 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 Blackburn
#58. There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity.
Nenia Campbell
#59. I charge my clients for my time and expertise, my heart is free.
Saurabh Gupta
#60. One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both.
Neel Burton
#61. ...in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.
Immanuel Kant
#63. Find out the difference between ethics and morality, but never forget to be kind.
Debasish Mridha
#64. Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, Why?
Thomas Cathcart
#65. Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
Immanuel Kant
#67. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Peter Singer
#68. Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).
Baruch Spinoza
#69. The ordinary man so very rarely questions the principles in which he has been brought up, that he is usually willing, whenever he has a feeling that he ought to do 'x', to say on this ground that he ought to do 'x'.
R.M. Hare
#70. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
George Orwell
#71. What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?
Nenia Campbell
#72. Every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself.
Marcus Aurelius
#73. What if our better nature wasn't better after all? But was instead, well, just nature?
Kevin Dutton
#74. The ethics of peace is liberal; it's not conservative based.
Henry Johnson Jr
#75. The sign of a good conscience is for a man to be in support of basically everything that Westboro Baptist isn't.
Luke Myer
#78. Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business ... because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people.
Stefan Molyneux
#79. You think you're superior to the others, don't you? We'll you're not. In fact you're worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.
Nenia Campbell
#80. I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.
David Pearce
#81. Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.
Terry Pratchett
#82. Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility.
Baruch Spinoza
#83. Moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.
Peter Singer
#84. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left.
Peter Singer
#85. As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
[Letter to William Short, 31 October 1819]
Thomas Jefferson
#86. The first questions naturally raised by a person emerging from the fog of childhood are the same questions that led Aristotle and other great philosophers to think and write deeply on the subjects of first philosophy and ethics.
Alan E. Johnson
#87. An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#88. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#89. Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.
Aristotle.
#90. If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.
Plato
#91. Atheism is a way of humility. It's to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human.
Andre Comte-Sponville
#92. The secret of the power of Christianity is not in its ethics. It is not in Christian ideas or philosophy ... the secret of Christianity is found ... in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Billy Graham
#94. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
#95. Do not perform an action for the reward it may bring. Perform it because it is right; it is dharma.
Shelley Schanfield
#96. ... if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#97. Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.
Fulton J. Sheen
#98. What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?
Various
#99. It is only when one is under extreme duress that one's true character is revealed.
Christopher Earle
#100. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...
Aldous Huxley
