Philosophy & Thought: Ethics & Morality Quotes

"One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction"

Karel Capek, Writer

"The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between evils"

Junius, Writer

"Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret"

Mary McCarthy, Author

"In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons"

Mary McCarthy, Author

"If we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious, it is all too easy to make our peace with it"

William Bennett, Politician

"I think celebrities have an obligation to the public to not just sing or act"

Clay Aiken, Musician

"Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is - and that is the point I want to stress - that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word"

Karel Capek, Writer

"The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon"

Felix Adler, Educator

"An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain, has taken possession of the commercial world, and, in instances no longer rare, the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment"

Felix Adler, Educator

"I don't think a reporter should give advice or make predictions"

Peter Jennings, Journalist

"When you put the interest of a kid on money instead of heart, then you're destroying the beauty of our lives and our thought process, which should be about how much responsibilities you carry as an athlete and a citizen"

Alexis Arguello, Athlete

"Mr. Speaker, the goal of stem cell research should be to help our fellow human beings. The debate on this issue has, unfortunately, moved into dangerous unethical territory when perfectly moral alternatives exist"

Jim Ryun, Athlete

"Love of country is like love of woman - he loves her best who seeks to bestow on her the highest good"

Felix Adler, Educator

"As long as you have a system that is based on the rational that if you are making money, you are thereby making a contribution to society, these financial rogue practices will continue"

David Korten, Activist

"This is the essential evil of vice, that it debases man"

Edwin Hubbel Chapin, Clergyman

"I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood"

Elia Kazan, Director

"Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman"

Edwin Hubbel Chapin, Clergyman

"At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion"

Edwin Hubbel Chapin, Clergyman

"Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice"

Elihu Root, Lawyer

"For a solitary animal, egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: In any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice"

Erwin Schrodinger, Scientist

"Right and wrong becomes more difficult for each of us as we grow older, because the older we get, the more we know personally about our own human frailties"

Blanche Lincoln, Politician

"Isn't it amazing how celebrity status preempts even the most ingrained hatreds?"

Camryn Manheim, Actress

"A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power"

Dean Koontz, Author

"When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?"

Jeremy Rifkin, Economist

"Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time"

Dean Koontz, Author

"Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - We fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we"

Jean Rostand, Scientist

"Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards"

George Farquhar, Dramatist

"Man seeks to change the foods available in nature to suit his tastes, thereby putting an end to the very essence of life contained in them"

Sai Baba, Leader

"The risk presented by these lethal wastes is like no other risk, and we should not be expected to accept it or to project it into the future in order for manufacturers and utilities to make a dollar killing now"

David R. Brower, Environmentalist

"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it"

Jean Rostand, Scientist

"To say of men that they are bad is to say they are worse than we think we are, or worse than the ideal man whose image we have built up on the basis of a certain few"

Jean Rostand, Scientist

"Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?"

David R. Brower, Environmentalist

"I do not believe in abortion at will. I do not believe that if a woman just wants to have an abortion she should... I do believe if you have an abortion you are committing murder"

Nancy Reagan, First Lady

"If money help a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better"

Swami Vivekananda, Clergyman

"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions"

Jean Rostand, Scientist

"In my view, the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... It is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction"

Tom Paulin, Poet

"Our intentions may be very good, but, because the intelligence is limited, the action may turn out to be a mistake - a mistake, but not necessarily a sin, for sin comes out of a wrong intention"

E. Stanley Jones, Theologian

"To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this, less pure paths must be followed"

Ernest Renan, Philosopher

"In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact"

Ernest Renan, Philosopher

"All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles"

Ernest Renan, Philosopher

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