Top 95 Philosophy And Ethics Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. What's the point of having beliefs and values if we don't stand up for the former and live by the latter?
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
#4. [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
#5. 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
#6. No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
Albert Camus
#7. So, at any rate, it appears. But appearance is not reality.
Gordon Graham
#8. 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
#9. A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.
Stefan Molyneux
#10. Life in accordance with intellect is best and pleasantest, since this, more than anything else, constitutes humanity.
Aristotle.
#11. 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
#13. Colleges don't teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another.
Bernard Baruch
#14. The greatest ethical test that we're ever going to face is the treatment of those who are at our mercy.
Lyn White
#15. 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
#16. We are not quite sure that the Sermon on the Mount is the Sermon for the mart. We are not
sure, and an unsure place is an unsafe place*
We must go on or go back. We must be more
Christian or less.
E. Stanley Jones
#17. If ethics is not the engine of success, in the train of growth, it sure is a guard, with a flag, which may be green, or at times red
Priyavrat Thareja
#18. 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
#19. Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#20. 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
#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. 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
#24. 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
#25. If any morality or ethics does not include kindness as their fundamental ingredient, then they are just an absurdity.
Debasish Mridha
#26. If justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth.
Immanuel Kant
#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. Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face.
Stefan Molyneux
#29. The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the "philosophy of human affairs;" but more frequently Political or Social Science.
Aristotle.
#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. 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
#33. 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
#34. We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.
Dalai Lama
#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
#38. Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority.
Donald J. Trump
#39. 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
#40. By wearing cosmetics a woman seeks to look younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty doesn't require that she issue a continuous disclaimer: I see you are looking at my face. Please be aware that I don't look this good first thing in the morning.
Sam Harris
#41. 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
#42. 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.
#43. True morals are a priceless thing that possesses the highest value and can never be bought or sold at any cost.
Abigail Landsbrook
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?
K.L. Toth
#47. It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed."
"That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.
Terry Pratchett
#48. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.
Aristotle.
#49. Love is the essence of all religion, mysticism, and philosophy, and for the one who has learned this, love fulfills the purpose of religion, ethics, and philosophy, and the lover is raised above all diversities of faiths and beliefs.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#50. 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
#51. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature.
Okakura Kakuzo
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I charge my clients for my time and expertise, my heart is free.
Saurabh Gupta
#58. Find out the difference between ethics and morality, but never forget to be kind.
Debasish Mridha
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Peter Singer
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself.
Marcus Aurelius
#68. What if our better nature wasn't better after all? But was instead, well, just nature?
Kevin Dutton
#69. The ethics of peace is liberal; it's not conservative based.
Henry Johnson Jr
#70. Work hard, do your best, live the truth, trust yourself, have some fun ... and you'll have no regrets.
Byrd Baggett
#71. Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.
Aristotle.
#72. Leadership responsibility is multidimensional and cannot be described in one or two words. It is personal, interpersonal, environmental and societal.
Linda Fisher Thornton
#73. 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
#74. There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.
I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
Jorge Luis Borges
#75. 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
#76. Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility.
Baruch Spinoza
#77. 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
#78. Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition
Baruch Spinoza
#79. 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
#80. Ethics are complete, profound and alive only when addressed to all living beings. Only then are we in spiritual connection with the world. Any philosophy not representing this, not based on the indefinite totality of life, is bound to disappear.
Albert Schweitzer
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#84. Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.
Paul Kurtz
#85. 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
#86. Wherever you work, work hard and educate yourself continuously. You must never forget social welfare, ethics and honesty. However, there is no guarantee for your career progression. Therefore, don't expect that only the best people will be promoted.
Eraldo Banovac
#87. 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
#88. If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
Chuck Klosterman
#89. As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
Jostein Gaarder
#90. Do not perform an action for the reward it may bring. Perform it because it is right; it is dharma.
Shelley Schanfield
#91. ... 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
#92. 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
#93. The processing of universals is the job of the unconscious. If we feed it the opposite it breaks; when it breaks we break and the people around us break.
Stefan Molyneux
#94. Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red - and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue - and no one should be allowed to read them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#95. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...
Aldous Huxley
