Top 100 Quotes About Good Ethics
#1. Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?
David Foster Wallace
#3. The sign of a good conscience is for a man to be in support of basically everything that Westboro Baptist isn't.
Luke Myer
#5. If [God] doesn't exist, man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#6. Good work requires enthusiasm, ethics, and excellence.
Daniel Goleman
#7. 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
#8. I'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.
Charlie Munger
#9. To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.
Albert Schweitzer
#13. How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? - from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.
Edgar Allan Poe
#14. There is no such thing as good and bad in an absolute sense. There is only the good and bad- the harm in terms of happiness and suffering- that our thoughts and our actions do to ourselves and others.
Matthieu Ricard
#15. Why is it a good thing to understand this movie so well? Because it will help you live a good life. Absorbing the deep meaning of the Nicomachean Ethics will also help you live a good life, but Groundhog Day will do it with a lot less effort. 35.
Charles Murray
#16. Good manners and soft words have brought many a difficult thing to pass.
John Vanbrugh
#17. To know the good is to react against the bad. Indifference is the mark of deprivation.
Marya Mannes
#18. 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
#19. You must always focus on and pursue the good, but when that darkness surges up from within, you need to know how to handle it, use it, and release it wisely, not just deny its presence or acceptability as you suppress it within you.
A.J. Darkholme
#20. 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
#21. There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.
Woody Allen
#22. In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients' "ease" but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonguing and even magnifying patients' dis-ease.
Jack Kevorkian
#23. Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.
Margaret Thatcher
#24. The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night
because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.
Jodi Picoult
#25. Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics - by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is
Sam Harris
#26. 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
#27. If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.
Dalai Lama
#28. 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
#29. A people and their religion must be judged by social standards based on social ethics. No other standard would have any meaning if religion is held to be necessary good for the well-being of the people.
B.R. Ambedkar
#30. 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
#31. Ethics is not for wimps. It's not easy being a good person. That's why it's such a lofty goal and an admirable achievement
Michael Josephson
#32. A country that tolerates evil means- evil manners, standards of ethics-for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.
Sinclair Lewis
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There's no longer a need for the social construct of religion.
David G. McAfee
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. [T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.
Arthur C. Clarke
#44. Mass communication communicates massively: its language lacks precise articulation and avoids demanding terms; it argues for the kind of behavior in life which will make a "good program": ethic equals showbiz.
Frederic Raphael
#45. Good decision making is the result of years of experience making and learning from one's choices - good and bad.
Michael J. Marx
#47. 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
#48. What we might consider is how we are good rather than how good we are.
Merrit Malloy
#49. 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
#51. Now the relation which, in the sphere of nature, being and semblance or sensation bear to one another in this antithesis, is the same as that which in ethics exists between good and pleasure or feeling.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
#53. I am & have been for years a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Anti-vaccination has no backing from the orthodox medical opinion. A medical man who expresses himself against vaccination loses caste. Tremendous pecuniary interests too have grown around vaccination.
Mahatma Gandhi
#54. 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
#57. Science has taught us how to put the atom to work. But to make it work for good instead of for evil lies in the domain dealing with the principles of human duty. We are now facing a problem more of ethics than physics.
Bernard Baruch
#58. Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad.
Rebecca McNutt
#59. Football, that's just athletics. But in the business world - doing everything - people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town.
Herschel Walker
#60. Then, as we turned the final curve past the abandoned little hamlet of Ballydubh, with the village almost out of sight, he forced me to turn around and take in the full sweep of the mountains and the sea. "And there", he said, "is your An Clohan. You had best said good-bye, now.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
#61. We must have Christian ethics for our children, good and strong, but we must make them attractive, too, and it can be done.
Enid Blyton
#62. 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
#64. Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Ethics without virtue is an illusion. What is the highest purpose of ethics? It is to make a person good, that is virtuous.
Peter Kreeft
#68. Regret is good. It proves you have a conscience.
J.R. Young
#69. Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be.
Aristotle.
#70. Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.
Aristotle.
#71. The argument about ethics and morality will have to go on in a post-religious society, just as it had to go on when religion was regnant and was often ordering good people to agree to evil things such as torture, slavery, or cruelty to children.
Christopher Hitchens
#72. With good morality first candidates you'll get bad candor, bad ethics, bad loyalty and bad morality - lastly bad odor will surface to save the day if you maintain good optimism like I do.
Brian Spellman
#73. 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
#74. I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.
Dan Barber
#75. Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.
Marc Bekoff
#76. A leader whose speech is prepared by others is not a leader; he is just an empty and stupid bottle! Use your own ideas and your own brain; write your own speech, just like Gandhi, Churchill or Nehru! That is indeed a good ethics and a good honour!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#77. Memory relates to ethics as well as to spirituality (the distinction between ethics and spirituality is a Western one and does more harm than good). Memory places obligations upon you. The Israelites were to remember their experience of servitude in Egypt, and treat their servants accordingly.
John E. Goldingay
#78. Many are really virtuous who cannot explain what virtue is ... But the powers themselves in reality perform their several operations with sufficient constancy and uniformity in persons of good health whatever their opinions be about them ...
Francis Hutcheson
#79. Why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches every facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics.
Erik Qualman
#80. ...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
#81. [About Jews] Among other nations, the vital problems are: a good crop, extension of the boundaries, strong armies, colonies; among us, if we wish to be true to ourselves, the vital questions are: conscience, freedom, culture, ethics.
I.L. Peretz
#82. What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#84. The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men ...
Baruch Spinoza
#86. If there are going to be people out there making war on other people, don't you think it's a good idea for some of those people to at least follow a code of ethics? Not 'honor' but something you can pin down and be sure of, something with the same rules for everybody.
Mercedes Lackey
#87. I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. Even though there are some people who do very well, like Marc Rich-who plainly has never had any decent ethics, or seldom anyway. But in the end, Warren Buffett has done better than Marc Rich-in money-not just in reputation.
Charlie Munger
#88. But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
Edgar Allan Poe
#89. [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
#90. The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
G.K. Chesterton
#91. Everything good is good because of the love it contains.
John K. Brown
#92. He that doth not as other men do, but endeavoureth that which ought to be done, shall thereby rather incur peril than preservation; for whoso laboureth to be sincerely perfect and good shall necessarily perish, living among men that are generally evil.
Walter Raleigh
#93. 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
#94. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
#95. How you doing at 26 Fed?"
"I'm growing and learning, meeting new challenges with confidence and enthusiasm while developing good work ethics and people skills."
"I'm surprised they haven't fired your ass."
"Me too.
Nelson DeMille
#96. An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.
Jean Vanier
#97. He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
Graham Greene
#98. 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.
#99. 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
#100. Epicurus as a moral empiricist felt that our immediate feelings are far more cogent and authoritative guides to the good life than abstract maxims, verbal indoctrination, or even the voice of reason itself. Hence he based his ethics on nature, not on convention or on reason.
Epicurus
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