Top 100 Ethics What Quotes
#1. That's a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.
Peter Singer
#2. Research by Harvard's Howard Gardner, Stanford's William Damon, and Claremont's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi zeroed in on what they call "good work," a potent mix of what people are excellent at, what engages them, and their ethics - what they believe matters.18
Daniel Goleman
#3. Omit a few of the most abstruse sciences, and mankind's study of man occupies nearly the whole field of literature. The burden of history is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology, what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall be.
George Finlayson
#5. When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?
Jaron Lanier
#6. If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.
Duff Goldman
#7. What our species needs, above all else, is a generally accepted ethical system that is compatible with the scientific knowledge we now possess.
Derek Freeman
#9. What if our better nature wasn't better after all? But was instead, well, just nature?
Kevin Dutton
#11. Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves-- autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?
Paul Broks
#12. When I started making my own music, I was more about recreating what I was hearing. I noticed that I had some control over what I was saying, and the effects that it's going to have on people. I wanted to focus more on the positive side of things, which are more in tune with my morals and ethics.
Lupe Fiasco
#13. Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Albert Schweitzer
#14. Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened ... but people like to keep what's theirs, even after their dead. It didnt take long for ethics to be crushed by greed. Unwinding became big business, and people let it happen
Neal Shusterman
#15. What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?
Nenia Campbell
#16. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
John Gray
#17. Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.
Bell Hooks
#18. What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.
Henry David Thoreau
#19. I 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 Singer
#20. You can do what's right, or you can do what you are told.
Phil Ochs
#21. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Peter Singer
#22. I'm passionate about creating new systems that are more holistic to humankind. What do I mean by that? I mean, create new systems of business so that people with ethics both exploit their goods and their gifts while not exploiting the earth, exploiting one another.
Billy Corgan
#23. It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that's consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#24. Our gods, if we choose to believe in them, must be forced to live up to ethics that far surpass our own human standards. If they fall short of the ethical conditions we place upon ourselves, what use are they to us - except to rationalize our own failures?
Stifyn Emrys
#25. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? - "Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. The
Viktor E. Frankl
#26. Keep integrity and your work ethics intact. So what if that means working a little harder; an honorable character is your best calling card, and that's something anyone can have!
Kathy Ireland
#28. Since when do grown men and women, who presume to hold high government office and exercise what they think of as "moral leadership," require ethics officers to tell them whether it is or isn't permissible to grab the secretary's behind or redirect public funds to their own personal advantage?
Meg Greenfield
#29. What I would like to do is to leave behind a sustainable entity of a set of companies that operate in an exemplary manner in terms of ethics, values and continue what our ancestors left behind.
Ratan Tata
#30. Ethics is the enemy of discovery. What you call ethics, I call the rape of science.
Katie Kacvinsky
#31. I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.
Carl Sandburg
#32. Ethics and Attitude Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Character is what you really are. Reputation is what people say you are. Character is more important.
John Wooden
#33. His moral lecture
blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far?
Dag Hammarskjold
#34. I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can.
James Mercer
#35. The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.
Robertson Davies
#36. Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.
Roger Mudd
#37. You have to get beyond blaming others ... give up your excuses ... stand responsible for what you do ... ultimately, ethics ends up an individual exercise.
Price Pritchett
#38. There are people who are bound journalistically to a code of ethics that means they can't quote something that isn't sourced, whereas what I do is entirely unsourced. I effectively fictionalise history and yet somehow aim at a greater truth.
Peter Morgan
#39. What's troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.
Barney Frank
#40. What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?
Bernhard Schlink
#41. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.
Dalai Lama XIV
#42. I focus on what's really important in life. Quality rather than appearance...ethics rather than rules...integrity rather than domination...knowledge rather than achievement...serenity rather than acquisitions.
Wayne Dyer
#43. In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.
W. Somerset Maugham
#44. What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?
Donald Miller
#45. It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
Aristotle.
#46. 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
#47. Ethics are determined by what they catch you doing. If you don't get caught, then you haven't violated any ethics.
John Grisham
#48. 'V-Wars' is a head-on collision of real-world science, terrorism, special forces action, ethics, politics and an exploration of what defines us as human.
Jonathan Maberry
#49. The 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 Pritchett
#50. We 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 Singer
#51. Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is the right thing to do. Potter Stewart,
Max Allan Collins
#52. We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.
Joan D. Chittister
#53. 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
#54. If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.
Philip K. Dick
#55. You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?"
"It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize."
"Must be a human thing."
"Exactly.
Christopher Moore
#57. 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
#58. The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.
Richard M. Rorty
#59. We know enough to know that all of this is not quite right. And we know enough to know that settling for what's not quite right is quite wrong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#60. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.
Richard Stallman
#61. My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.
Christian Bale
#62. What is more likely? That tomorrow will be called 'Thursday' or that Maxine Waters will play the race card in her ethics investigation?
Jonah Goldberg
#63. I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
John Stuart Mill
#64. In high school ethics, they went around and asked what everyone thought their classmates were qualified to do. For me, everyone said actress. But to me it was very much 'if it happens, it happens.'
Amanda Schull
#65. A 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 Weiwei
#66. Since when did the community become our moral compass - our viability and ethics as writers determined so much by our team spirit? ... What if all this communing actually hurts the primary means by which I set out to participate and communicate - my writing itself?
Meghan Tifft
#67. Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.
Theaster Gates
#68. If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.
Richard Kearney
#69. We have examined a number of ethical issues. We have seen that many accepted practices are open to serious objections. What ought we to do about it? This, too, is an ethical issue.
Peter Singer
#70. That's what it's come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we'll be free.
James S.A. Corey
#71. Putting yourself in the place of others ... is what thinking ethically is all about.
Peter Singer
#72. If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
Herbert Marcuse
#73. You've got to be brave and you've got to be bold. Brave enough to take your chance on your own discrimination, what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad.
Robert Frost
#74. Contrast, humanistic ethics takes the position that if man is alive he knows what is allowed; and to be alive means to be productive, to use one's powers not for any purpose transcending man, but for oneself, to make sense of one's existence, to be human. As
Greg M. Epstein
#75. What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
Sam Harris
#76. Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#77. The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
#78. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?
Charlotte Bronte
#79. May we think of freedom not as the right to do as we please but as the opportunity to do what is right.
Peter Marshall
#80. Ben Franklin said:
"Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy wealthy and wise"
Lately I have read the advice given to William Randolph Hearst, when a young man, by his father:
"Go downtown at noon and rob the other fellows of what they have made during the morning.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#81. What we might consider is how we are good rather than how good we are.
Merrit Malloy
#83. Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.
Jill Stauffer
#84. In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.
John Quincy Adams
#85. The 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 Schweitzer
#86. SEN. McCARTHY: You will teach morality, ethics, and good house-keeping to these 48 states, and to the world. By order of this committee, June Cleaver, you will be a beacon! You will sire the future and teach it what we tell you to teach it! Echo effect, echo effect, echo effect ...
Benjamin R. Smith
#87. As Americans, we're not sure we share values. We're sometimes even afraid to use the word 'values.' We talk about teaching ethics in schools - people say, 'What ethics? Whose ethics? Maybe we can't.' And they confuse that with teaching of religion.
Rudy Giuliani
#88. The ethics of eating people are blurry at best in the fog of my undead amnesia, but I expect more for such a high price. What I want are the moments I will never have. The warm ones. The living ones.
Isaac Marion
#89. ...The happy Warrior... is he... who, with a natural instinct to discern what knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; abides by this resolve, and stops not there, but makes his moral being his prime care.
William Wordsworth
#90. It's not doing what is right that's hard for a President. It's knowing what is right.
Lyndon Johnson
#91. I think Chicagoans have a great set of values. You know what I mean? Kindness. Morals. Ethics. People in Chicago do the right thing. If somebody falls on the street, someone will actually stop and help them up. That doesn't happen in certain other cities.
Sondra Radvanovsky
#92. What is the nature of true morality? I have argued ... that it must be a kind of ethics involving letting go of one's own interest on behalf of others, being ready if necessary to sacrifice one's own interests for them, even on behalf of an enemy.
George F. R. Ellis
#93. If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.
Peter Singer
#94. Think of it." Now he is speaking to you, no one but you. "It may not matter what we want for science, or what we think is ethical. All we must do is provide the right environment, and let the heart do what it desires. The heart wants to beat.
Stephen Kiernan
#95. Each of us would like the ability to do what we want to do, when we want to do it, without incurring the moral approbation of others. We, however, tend to conveniently forget this also gives others the right to do whatever they want.
Stephen McAndrew
#96. The ethics of excellence are grounded in action - what you actually do, rather than what you say you believe. Talk, as the saying goes, is cheap.
Price Pritchett
#97. Men with power had the responsibility to know what was best, and they so rarely did.
Beck Sherman
#98. We opt to be seen as 'right' in the eyes of everyone else, rather than doing what's 'right' in light of the situation.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#99. Karna is a good man, but he sees good even in what is bad. His seeing it as good doesn't make the bad good, but makes his goodness look bad.
Kavita Kane
#100. Journalism and the questions of journalistic ethics, and why certain stories are put on the air, when, how and for what reasons, are big questions in our culture and society.
Thomas Sadoski
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