Top 100 Moral Ethics Quotes
#1. There are a lot of people who pretend to have moral ethics and they talk from both sides of their mouth.
John Assaraf
#2. I care not for the body which may rot. Yet, for the transgression of the spirit, of moral ethics, of life, liberty and the soul itself, I must and shall cross the line of battle or lose the very reason not to.
The Great Pacifist
#3. Irrespective of whether we are believers or agnostics, whether we believe in God or karma, moral ethics is a code which everyone is able to pursue.
Dalai Lama XIV
#4. Leadership responsibility is multidimensional and cannot be described in one or two words. It is personal, interpersonal, environmental and societal.
Linda Fisher Thornton
#5. Work hard, do your best, live the truth, trust yourself, have some fun ... and you'll have no regrets.
Byrd Baggett
#6. The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.
Bill Nye
#7. The ethics of peace is liberal; it's not conservative based.
Henry Johnson Jr
#9. Dangerous consequences will follow when politicians and rulers forget moral principles. Whether we believe in God or karma, ethics is the foundation of every religion.
Dalai Lama XIV
#10. What if our better nature wasn't better after all? But was instead, well, just nature?
Kevin Dutton
#11. Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
John Ralston Saul
#12. We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good - for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It's called 'moral vanity'.
Greg Egan
#13. 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
#15. Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.
Oscar Wilde
#16. A moral dilemma can be large or small, important or inconsequential, urgent or secondary. One thing is certain: moral dilemmas are ever present.
Michael J. Marx
#17. 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
#18. [ ... ] God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.
Susan Neiman
#19. It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
Roger Scruton
#20. Satan mostly employs comparatively moral instruments and the language of ethics to give his aims an air of respectability.
Mahatma Gandhi
#21. 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
#22. The men can have a moral compass that is just unshakeable, they can have ethics that run to the core.
Lupe Fiasco
#23. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today's secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics.
Dalai Lama XIV
#24. Disgust is so reassuring; it feels like a moral proof.
Jed Rubenfeld
#25. There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter Lippmann
#26. I've tried to live my life right, just like a story.
Angela Sidney
#27. Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
#29. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
Peter Singer
#30. Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles are autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#31. 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
#32. Jamie was like no one else he had ever met. She had ethics; she had moral integrity. She was clearly not corruptible, at least not for money
that test was over.
Patricia Cori
#33. ...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
#34. 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
#35. I charge my clients for my time and expertise, my heart is free.
Saurabh Gupta
#36. Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems.
Charles W. Colson
#37. It is as if a Mohammedan, while recognizing the divine mission of the Arab prophet, were to write for his son a treatise on the ethics of the New Testament as better adapted than the moral system of the Koran for the training and confirming of a young man in the practice of virtue.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#38. His moral lecture
blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far?
Dag Hammarskjold
#39. Not everyone can be bribed with meat, Oberon."
"They Can't? Oh! you mean they're vegetarian."
"No, they eat meat. It just doesn't sway their decision making process."
"Well that ... that's just wrong, Atticus!Are they Monsters? It's like they have no moral center!
Kevin Hearne
#40. Divine permission, given to people who think they have god on their side, enables actions that a morally normal unbeliever would not contemplate.
Christopher Hitchens
#41. The Sermon on the Mount seems dangerous. It challenges the whole underlying conception on which modern society is built. It would replace it by a new conception, animate it with a new motive, and turn it toward a new goal.
E. Stanley Jones
#42. If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...a value conferring status.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#43. 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
#45. You can't put someone else in charge of your morals. Ethics is a personal discipline.
Price Pritchett
#46. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...
Aldous Huxley
#47. I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.
Oscar Wilde
#48. 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
#49. You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.
Ravi Zacharias
#50. Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics. Here we find ideas of moral wrong and moral right associated with something else than beneficial action. The consequent is, we lose sight of the real basis of morals, and substitute a false one.
Frances Wright
#51. For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.
Jessica Valenti
#52. Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.
Rachel Hartman
#53. ... 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
#54. Do not perform an action for the reward it may bring. Perform it because it is right; it is dharma.
Shelley Schanfield
#55. No one talks about the real ethics disaster in Washington. It's that many members of Congress will listen to any argument against a bill except for two: that it's not moral or that it's not Constitutional.
Ron Paul
#56. There are no "standards of Right". Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing.
Aleister Crowley
#57. If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
Chuck Klosterman
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.
Hanya Yanagihara
#62. Putting yourself in the place of others ... is what thinking ethically is all about.
Peter Singer
#63. As long as someone else controls your history the truth shall remain just a mystery
Ben Harper
#64. When a hunter is in a tree stand with high moral values and with the proper hunting ethics and richer for the experience, that hunter is 20 feet closer to God.
Fred Bear
#65. There is no moral absolute, and this leads us to situational ethics, which unfortunately is being taught in public schools all over America. This means that right and wrong is dependent upon the circumstances.
Ted Cruz
#66. There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having ... money in the bank.
Tom Robbins
#67. Masonry is first and foremost an education society, one which TEACHES moral and ethics - a way of life. Secondly,
Cliff Porter
#68. State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.
Thomas Jefferson
#69. The justice of any single commandment cannot be proven logically in an irrefutable manner, and there is no moral law which is binding under all conditions without exception. Ethics, generally, exist only as far as we are willing to accept them.
(from 'The Specter of Alexander Wolf')
Gaito Gazdanov
#71. Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity's reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.
Karen Davis
#72. We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.
Terry Hayes
#73. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#75. 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
#76. If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.
Stephen McAndrew
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.
Peter Singer
#80. I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect.
Richard M. Stallman
#81. Here'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 Kushner
#83. ...our ultimate moral principles can become so completely accepted by us, that we treat them, not as universal imperatives but as matters of fact; they have the same obstinate indubitability.
R.M. Hare
#84. ...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
#85. Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.
Hugo Chavez
#86. To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact
Peter Singer
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.
Mahavira
#90. If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
Oscar Wilde
#91. At the bitter end of an era of liberation - women's lib, kids' lib, animal lib, and everything-but-ethics lib - America has apparently been liberated from its moral foundations. But for too many, the good life has become a living hell.
Billy Graham
#92. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world's most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America.
John Cornwell
#93. Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.
G.E. Moore
#95. 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
#96. One of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.
Ken Wilber
#97. Virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.
Aristotle.
#98. 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
#99. The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#100. 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
