c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands.
— Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death
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, Writings on an Ethical Life
There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.
— Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life
Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.
— Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening. Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood...
— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.
— David Pearce
Frankly, Pedro Almodóvar's recent box office hit, Volver, is the first movie I've seen in which a young woman's retaliation against sexual violence doesn't ultimately boomerang around to destroy her
— Sarah Stillman
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, Principia Ethica
Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Putting yourself in the place of others...is what thinking ethically is all about.
— Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
…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, New Essays on Human Understanding
I don't actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all." Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. "I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that's always going to depend on who you're dealing with.
— Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky
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, Ethics
...moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.
— Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
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
The true religion is to be posited not in the knowledge or confession of what God allegedly does or has done for our salvation, but in what we must do to become worthy of this.
— Immanuel Kant
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
You can do what's right, or you can do what you are told.
— Phil Ochs
The standards of judgement must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.
— Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
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
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, Creating the Kingdom of Ends
Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning....
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
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, Creating the Kingdom of Ends
[A} maxim's legal character must be intrinsic: it must have what I shall call 'lawlike form.' this is why legal character, or universality, must be understood as lawlike form, that is, as a requirement of universalizability.
— Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends
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
Just because something was legal didn't automatically make it right.
— Carl Hiaasen, Hoot
Any preference for my group's interests over yours must be justified by some unbiased, disinterested ethic. Which sounds simple but, given that we're dealing with Humans and not Vulcans, it's sometimes difficult for two parties to agree on basic principles, specially parties who are unable or unwilling to switch points of view. This is the power of ethical reasoning.
— Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom
Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power will not perish from the earth; its schools of martial prowess or civic honor may be demolished, but its light and its glory will long survive their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown to the four winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will enrich life.
— Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan. A Classic Essay on Samurai Ethics
Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History Of Ethics: A History Of Moral Philosophy From The Homeric Age To The Twentieth Century
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, A Short History Of Ethics: A History Of Moral Philosophy From The Homeric Age To The Twentieth Century
As the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy's innate sense of responsibility. – Arthur Schlesinger
— David Pietrusza, 1960--LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies
Mr. Lilly, on the other hand, is not selling me a product I can use. He is selling a fancy new thing called a methodology. You know what a methodology is? It's a painted box filled with nothing except my own desires for a more profitable company. He is looking to take a percentage of the transaction between me and my own soul without creating any value. This is a very old trick that's been going on since religion began. It is without ethics and it distinguishes me from Mr. Lilly.
— Charlie Close, Before the Ripcord Broke: Stories
Collectivist ethical principle: man is not an end to himself, but is only a tool to serve the ends of others. Whether those ‘others’ are a dictator’s gang, the nation, society, the race, (the) god(s), the majority, the community, the tribe, etc., is irrelevant – the point is that man in principle must be sacrificed to others.
— Mark Cunha
… what I’m saying is that if we and all the other species on earth are the only life forms in the universe and if there are no gods and let’s face it apart from a few tired scrolls written 300 years after the death of Jesus and his disciples there is no actual proof of a God or gods then we, the humans, who are meant to be at the height of the evolutionary tree, are in fact at the bottom because no other species on this planet is enslaved to the economy. Every other species is born free and lives free. We humans are born into economic slavery and life crippling debt.
— Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism
...I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty And Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.
— Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
If the teachings of the Protestants in Europe gave birth to the Protestant ethics and the modern civilization, it becomes alarming that most of our charismatic teachings today mainly concentrate on individual aggrandizement
— Sunday Adelaja
I am in a profession that has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it’s not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering.
— Atul Gawande
Up till recently 75% of all inventions from the time of the industrial revolution is credited to the countries where Protestant ethics were taught
— Sunday Adelaja
In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it.
— Leon R. Kass
As for the errors I make, the only punishment I acknowledge for having made them is my awareness of those errors, and having to live with it: there is, there should be, no heavier penalty on a person's soul, mind and heart.
— Joumana Haddad
If a curiously selective plague came along and killed all people of intermediate height, 'tall' and 'short' would come to have just as precise a meaning as 'bird' or 'mammal'. The same is true of human ethics and law. Our legal and moral systems are deeply species-bound. The director of a zoo is legally entitled to 'put down' a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might 'put down' a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees in this way is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [T]he only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.
— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
Peace is a process - a way of solving problems.
— John F. Kennedy
The media "could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.
— Tom Clancy, Executive Orders
Netiquette: The social code of network communication. Internet code of conduct based on the Golden Rule. Ethical philosophy of common rules.
— David Chiles
...ethics were in most cases a burden that could be reasonably ignored in pursuit of necessity.
— Kelley Armstrong, Omens
What is so 'only' about 'yourself'? Is not the first thing one has to learn in this respect that to do something for yourself--I mean, the right kind of thing--is just as valuable and ethical than to do it for somebody else? Wouldn't you say that the good feeling we get simply because we did 'it' (whatever) for somebody else is cheating, in that it postpones the question: what is it good for?
— Rudolf Arnheim
Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.
— Jeffrey D. Sachs
Hunting, works for conservation like slavery works for economic growth. A guaranteed but morally awful way to achieve a goal.
— Peter Allison
Overall, becoming a carbon-neutral country would involve changes in our behaviour, but these are modest compared with the changes that will be forced upon us if we do nothing.
— Caroline Lucas
Romantic enthusiasm lifts the good aloft and removes it into the dim distance of the incomparable and unattainable; at the same time it portrays the good in a human countenance out of which it looks at us and we can look back at it, face to face, in admiration and ecstasy, and stretch out our arms towards it. Thus the moral good is represented in human, and at the same time superhuman, form; it is of our own kind, and yet above our kind; it confronts us, but makes no demands. IT is not really a standard and lacks the power to issues commandments. Both are given at once: the ethical which one would like to love; and the passive, the romantic, in which one wants to live. As a substitute for constant activity demanded by the ethical commandment, we have adoration in which the romantic impression of the moment in vented, and yearning which need only admire and enjoy but not achieve anything.
— Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity: essays by Leo Baeck
Politics exists in every organization, We can not deny
— Avinash Advani
So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.
— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
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, Shadow Scale
If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
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, The Nicomachean Ethics
Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern he world in the was of peace, decency and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.
— S. Michael Wilcox
Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.
— Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.
— John Irving, In One Person
An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.
— Howard Jacobson, J
This is the first time I have heard ‘ethics’ in the mouth of a man. You and I are the only men on this ship that know its meaning. At one time in my life, I dreamed that I might someday talk with men who used such language, that I might lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and hold conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as ethics.
— Jack London, The Sea Wolf
What is stealing?When is it excusable? When is it a crime?' Thomas looked uncomfortable as he read. Christian perked up. Belle saw Christian listening with interest and looked down at her shoes. 'An action becomes stealing when one of two conditions are met. First, when there is harm to the victim. Second, when the act is done for personal gain.' Thomas looked up and smiled. He seemed happy with where the speech was going, and Belle breathed a sigh of relief. Christian's face had gone white. He stood frozen in his spot. Belle smiled as if to say that things were different with him. That stealing was different in their world. She was torn between excitement for Thomas and embarasment for Christian. 'If both these criteria are met, there is no question where society stands. When of two criteria is in question, society begins to debate. For example, is it wrong when someone takes something that has been thrown away? Perhaps not, since there is no detriment to the victim. Is it wrong when someone takes a loaf of bread to feed a starving baby or taxes the rich to help the poor? Perhaps not, since the motive is unselfish.' Victoria wasn't even looking at Thomas anymore. She was glaring at Belle. She looked like she was about to lunge at her. Belle signaled to her that perhaps she should take notes. But Victoria wasn't used to preparing rebuttals without advanced notice.'When neither of the criteria is met, however, I propose that there is no crime against ethics. Is it wrong to take a syringe from a drug addict? Of course not.
— Daniel Nayeri, Another Faust
It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used—against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them—to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Let us be honest we have praised Angulimala, will make no difference If you convey my salute to Amrapali.
— Suman Pokhrel
Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
— Carl Sagan
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.
— Noam Chomsky
There are no snares more dangerous than those which lurk under the guise of duty or the name of relationship.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
That's what it's come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we'll be free.
— James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes
Knowing your limits, and that there is a limit to getting what you want, comes from a sense of self-respect instilled in you from an early age. It takes guts to stand up in the face of what you really want, but you have to know in your heart that if you make the wrong choice you won't be able to live with yourself for the rest of your life. There is only one person who matters at that point and that's YOU. If you give in to such pressures, you strip away your self-respect, your personal ethics and your standards - the very things that create the fiber that will hold you together for the rest of your life.
— Goldie Hawn
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, Discusión
Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon.
— David Cronenberg, Consumed
Integrity, by its definition, means adhering consistently to a strong, reliable code of ethics, whatever that code is.
— Scott K. Edinger, The Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness Within Your Company
I am very proud of the fact that 20 years [sic] on people tell me they became a vegetarian as a result of 'Meat is Murder'. I think that is quite literally rock music changing someone's life - it's certainly changing the life of animals. It is one of the things I am most proud of.
— Johnny Marr
A true leader does not derive power from his position, but from his ethics, from people’s love for him, and from his knowledge, education and excellence in his field of work.
— Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Flashes of Thought
Be true to yourself-at the core of your leadership are your values and morals.
— Artika Tyner
One’s email address serves as an identity online and speaks volumes about a person; it may be telling potential clients, partners or employers a whole lot about you: to be hired or fired. Unfortunately most send negative signals, indicating that: you are not a serious person - you are immature - Unprofessional, - Uncouth. etc. Take a look at your email address again today, get professional, be ethical, respectful, be admirable
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
Ethical hacking!! Is it not an oxymoron?
— Ankala V Subbarao
Lewis Richardson wrote that his quest to analyze peace with numbers sprang from two prejudices. As a Quaker, he believed that "the moral evil in war outweighs the moral good, although the latter is conspicuous." As a scientist, he thought there was too much moralizing about war and not enough knowledge. "For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that 'tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner' [to understand all is to forgive all], I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because 'beaucoup condamner c'est peu comprendre' [to condemn much is to understand little]." (p. 200)
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
We opt to be seen as ‘right’ in the eyes of everyone else, rather than doing what’s ‘right’ in light of the situation.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
those, who are believed to be most self—abased and humble, are generally in reality the most ambitious and envious
— Baruch Spinoza
In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
whether they knew of didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. (...) by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, "My conscience is clear! I did not know! I was a believer!" Isn't his "I did not know I was a believer!" at the very root of his irreparable guilt?
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.
— Simon Blackburn, Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love
The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.
— Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics: And Other Essays
Right and wrong applies to internet interaction. It's #Netiquette. NetworkEtiquette.net
— David Chiles
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, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-Modern
It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out.
— John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
We often confuse determination with its evil twin: fixation. While determination is our ability to stand our ground while pursuing our goals. Fixation, on the other hand, is an unhealthy attachment to an ideal.
— Venugopal Gupta
Face the complexity involved in making ethical choices.
— Linda Fisher Thornton
It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.
— Jacob Needleman, The American Soul: TK
He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante's Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man's unvarnished verdict of himself?
— Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy
Good intentions are good netiquette. A conscious effort to be nice others on the internet. NetworkEtiquette.net
— David Chiles, The Principles Of Netiquette
When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Because we are a globally connected village, we need to remember that our choices are not isolated. They have a powerful ripple effect, and that ripple is global.
— Linda Fisher Thornton
The reason why she had chosen journalism was because of those who had done so before her. Stalwart women and men who reported stories in the days before the Internet. Before it was fashionable to learn Mass Communication. A long time before being a TV reporter and calling up your family to see your face beamed to their homes was an in thing. They were those who had left their families behind as they pursued the truth, opting to go to jail when the government hounded them to reveal their sources. Men and women that would rather quit than write editorials the management wanted them to write. Journalists who never wrote a word they would have to disown. Journalists who took their last breath as they wrote an article was true to what they believed in. They would never sit down and take stock of the stories they had covered and written saying, “So what if twenty of these are non-stories, I at least had five I believed in.
— Shweta Ganesh Kumar, Between The Headlines
With nature on your side, you don’t need numbers, you don’t need financing and you certainly don’t need to make friends with people you should be fightingagainst.
— Christopher Rankin, Creating Monsters
Socialism is politicized envy.
— Rousas John Rushdoony, Exodus: Commentaries on the Pentateuch
Sol wanted to know how any ethical system – much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it – could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son. It did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last moment. It did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove Sol into fits of fury.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone…I didn’t ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else.
— Steve Wozniak
In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.
— Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
Leadership responsibility is multidimensional and cannot be described in one or two words. It is personal, interpersonal, environmental and societal.
— Linda Fisher Thornton
No, this isn't right. I don't think the people doing it know or care about right and wrong. This is all some kind of show, but I don't understand it either.
— J.Z. Colby, Selection
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
The difficulty was not that of following a moral principle at personal cost; the difficulty was that of knowing what to do when there is more than one principal, and when the principles clash.
— Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership
He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry."WHY, Captain?" he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. "I would have the the real question was WHY NOT?
— Imogen Howson, Linked
He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry."WHY, Captain?" he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. "I would have thought the the real question was WHY NOT?
— Imogen Howson, Linked
Swag is my ethic, s/o to my bitches
— Joe Prophet
As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.
— Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
If you can’t see the feelings in a donkey, a ship, or a delicate tool, then it’s just as easy to not see them in your brother or sister when you can profit by treating them badly.
— J.Z. Colby, Flight Training & Kibi and the Search for Happiness
If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.
— Plato, Gorgias
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 Kané, Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen
I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there's really no hope for you.
— Joe Hill, Locke & Key, Vol. 3: Crown of Shadows
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
While mistakes may be local, in today’s connected world embarrassment is global
— Gyan Nagpal, Talent Economics: The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent
I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.
— William Lane Craig
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, Phenomenology of Perception
If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.
— Henry Kravis
I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life
—  I should not be honest otherwise.
Everything good is good because of the love it contains.
— John K.  Brown
5:3 Do Not Wither within Your Area of Expertise...But the lawyer must not allow the client to make a decision that the lawyer believes is wrong without a forceful and effective presentation by the lawyer of his or her position on the subject. When the matter is within the sphere of the lawyer's expertise, the lawyer must not permit the fear of being wrong to devour the lawyer's obligation to urge a course of action which the lawyer believes to be the best." (p.58)
— Peter Siviglia, Writing Contracts: A Distinct Discipline
By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
— William Lane Craig
Hope is a passion for the possible.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest.
— Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?
— Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
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, The Brothers Karamazov
It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that's consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
It is not at all surprising that the disciples imagined that the law had been abrogated, when Jesus made promises like this. For these promises reversed all popular notions of right and wrong, and pronounced a blessing on all that was accounted worthless.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
I did dream of it, chiefly because 'all things are lawful.' That was quite right what you taught me, for you talked a lot to me about that. For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
If you are not rising with ethics, you will sink with every rise!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics
—  anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.
It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
— Aristotle
If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?
— K.L. Toth
Those who think that modern times are wickeder than previous times are apt to identify the cause as the weakening of a sense of moral law, associated with the departure of religious traditions of morality as a social influence... Such views give comfort to apologists for religion, who fasten on the implication that to revive a culture of moral concern people must be encouraged back into churches. But this reprises the usual muddle that getting people to accept as true... such propositions as that at a certain historical point a virgin gave birth, that the laws of nature were arbitrarily suspended so that, for example, water turned into wine, that several corpses came to life (and so forth), will somehow give them a logical reason for living morally (according to the attached view of what is moral - e.g. not marrying if you can help it, not divorcing if you do, and so forth again). It is scarcely needful to repeat that the morality and the metaphysics here separately at stake do not justify or even need one another, and that the moral questions require to be grounded and justified on their own merits in application to what they concern, namely, the life of human beings in the social setting.
— A.C. Grayling, What Is Good?
And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?
— Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
I cannot kill someone, he thought.
— Lois Lowry, Son
We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.
— Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations
Life in a box was unbearable.How did humans stand it?
— Patrick Jennings, We Can't All Be Rattlesnakes
I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?Yes.It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous.Such as?Be not in haste, said the tortoise.There is nothing here but time.If you live long enough, you will see.Of course, though, you will see them from your cage.Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here?The tortoise chuckled. The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in.What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough?Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough.How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked.
— Patrick Jennings, We Can't All Be Rattlesnakes
Until we are willing to oppose all abortion--ALL ABORTION---then the Christian community will lack the true ethical high ground to oppose ANY ABORTIONS. The minute we concede that there is any ground--even in the so-called case of rape, incest or the health of the mother---to make a decision to self-consciously and deliberately kill a child based on our puny, finite understanding of the facts, and a a cost-benefit analysis based on our pragmatic post-modern vision of utlilitarian ethics, we have conceded everything. We have abandoned biblical law and granted to Planned Parenthood the legitimacy of the core argument they have advanced since Margaret Sanger founded the organization--namely, that some circumstances of pregnancy are sufficiently uncomfortable or troubling that man has the right to play God and declare his own authority to take the life of an innocent, unborn baby.
— Douglas W. Phillips
So I'd been captured? So I was starving?Did that mean I had to shrivel up and die?I could still slither. I could still hiss. Nothing had been stolen from me except my freedom.What I needed was a new plan.
— Patrick Jennings, We Can't All Be Rattlesnakes