Ethics Quotes

Can we be sure that they are incapable of the feelings or sentiments that are believed to place them on a lower scale than humans? Do we deny sensitivity to all of the so-called lower orders to blunt, protect, and, ultimately, deny our own? We will see that bees can grieve over teh loss of a queen, sound war cries or hum with contentment; they can be angry, docile, ferocious, playful, aggressive, appear happy, or utter pitiful sounds of distress. are these not emotions akin to ours, merely expressed differently?

William Longgood

Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.

K.W. Jeter

Without ethics, science would be cruelty.

Nenia Campbell

An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.

Jean Vanier

...observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions.

Sigmund Freud

Science cannot stop while ethics catches up - and nobody should expect scientists to do all the thinking for the country

Elvin Stackman

...perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.

Sigmund Freud

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

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

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

Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society

Bertrand Russell

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Omar Nelson Bradley

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil

Friedrich Nietzsche

How little we really know about the life all around us. Would we be so cavalier and ruthless with it if we understood it better?

William Longgood

A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations - to be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promoting in the long run even the interests of both; and I am sure it promotes their happin

Thomas Jefferson

I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man.

Thomas Jefferson

Winning is nice if you don't lose your integrity in the process.

Arnold Horshak