Top 100 Philosophy Ethics 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. 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. Something is objective if it is independent of people's opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people's opinions.
William Lane Craig
#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. So, at any rate, it appears. But appearance is not reality.
Gordon Graham
#6. The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men ...
Baruch Spinoza
#7. Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning ...
Peter Singer
#8. Life in accordance with intellect is best and pleasantest, since this, more than anything else, constitutes humanity.
Aristotle.
#10. ...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
#11. The greatest ethical test that we're ever going to face is the treatment of those who are at our mercy.
Lyn White
#12. Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.
Nancy Pearcey
#13. 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
#15. 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. I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
#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. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.
John Rawls
#28. 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
#29. It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.
Marcus Aurelius
#30. Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face.
Stefan Molyneux
#31. 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.
#32. 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
#33. If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
~(Camus, as quoted by Tony Judt)
Albert Camus
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. I have gained this by philosophy ... I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.
Aristotle.
#39. The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.
Stefan Molyneux
#40. Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority.
Donald J. Trump
#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. Netiquette: The social code of network communication. Internet code of conduct based on the Golden Rule. Ethical philosophy of common rules.
David Chiles
#47. 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
#48. If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?
K.L. Toth
#49. 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.
#50. ....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.
G.E. Moore
#51. 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
#52. If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
Chuck Klosterman
#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. 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
#55. 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
#56. It is only when one is under extreme duress that one's true character is revealed.
Christopher Earle
#57. 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
#58. It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
Aristotle.
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. ...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
#68. 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
#69. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Peter Singer
#70. Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).
Baruch Spinoza
#71. 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
#72. What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?
Nenia Campbell
#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
#76. There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
Elie Wiesel
#77. 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
#78. In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it.
Leon R. Kass
#80. 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
#81. To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact
Peter Singer
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.
Peter Singer
#87. Ethics is nothing other than reverence for life because God is within every other human being you come in contact with either physically, or emotionally. Living with reverence for life is attuning goodliness, which is a state of godliness.
Vishwas Chavan
#88. Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition
Baruch Spinoza
#89. Leadership responsibility is multidimensional and cannot be described in one or two words. It is personal, interpersonal, environmental and societal.
Linda Fisher Thornton
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. Ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas.
Martin Cohen
#95. 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
#97. 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
#98. Putting yourself in the place of others ... is what thinking ethically is all about.
Peter Singer
#99. 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
#100. 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
