Philosophy & Thought: Ethics & Morality Quotes

"A "sin" is something which is not necessary"

G. I. Gurdjieff, Educator

"Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace"

Arthur Bremer, Criminal

"Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept"

Robert Bork, Public Servant

"When a benevolent mind contemplates the republic of Lycurgus, its admiration is mixed with a degree of horror"

Thomas Day, Author

"No one today knows what is indecent"

Jack Valenti, Businessman

"Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal"

Polly Toynbee, Journalist

"I have always maintained that society has no business dictating morality"

Peter Fonda, Actor

"The proposition that we should encourage wickedness and violence by exposing one side of the face to blows because we have been beaten on the other is too great an absurdity"

Thomas Mellon, Businessman

"The holocaust against the unborn is the greatest sin they could ever do or even ever participate in"

Norma McCorvey, Celebrity

"Patients would come in and say, Well, my baby is going to have a cleft palate. I'm going like, that's not a reason. And the doctor would do the abortion"

Norma McCorvey, Celebrity

"If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil"

Jonah Goldberg, Celebrity

"When everything is for 'fun', nothing is for the good"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"Neutrality, as a lasting principle, is an evidence of weakness"

Lajos Kossuth, Lawyer

"When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning"

Gerrit Smith, Politician

"It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents' generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents' generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks"

Peter Fonda, Actor

"I willingly took John Lennon's life. What I did was despicable"

Mark David Chapman, Criminal

"Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent"

George Steiner, Critic

"Depart from discretion when it interferes with duty"

Hannah More, Writer

"If you going to live by a certain code - as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody"

Thomas Wilson, Writer

"Once you take a life, that's it. I don't even deserve to be here"

Mark David Chapman, Criminal

"I don't know how one actually would define obscenity. I'm sure the definition is different according to the age one is living in"

Jane Alexander, Actress

"Withholding information that would get innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a journalistic sin"

Eason Jordan, Journalist

"Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations"

Timothy McVeigh, Criminal

"To deal with the stark reality of having hit or hurt a woman or child, to deal with the initial responsibility you have not to do that and the knowledge you did do it, can be incredibly hard"

David Soul, Actor

"One who imitates what is bad always goes beyond his model; while one who imitates what is good always comes up short of it"

Francesco Guicciardini, Historian

"I have been committed to carrying out my duties... in accordance with both the letter and spirit of all applicable rules of ethics and canons of conduct"

Samuel Alito, Judge

"If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted"

Larry McMurtry, Writer

"Our consciences are littered, like an old attic, with the junk of sheer conviction"

Wilford O. Cross, Writer

"It is the custom of the Roman Church which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law"

Pope Gregory VII, Clergyman

"I used to get some flack from my agents because I wouldn't even audition for parts where the hero uses violent force to be a hero"

Mackenzie Astin, Actor

"Subject the material world to the higher ends by understanding it in all its relations to daily life and action"

Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards

"We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible"

Allan Massie, Writer

"Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan's endorsement - it might be useful, but it doesn't necessarily speak well of you"

Jonah Goldberg, Celebrity

"If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it, through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not matter"

Ralph A. Cram, Architect

"I succumbed to hedonism"

Simon Le Bon, Musician

"A viewer who skips the advertising is the moral equivalent of a shoplifter"

Nicholas Johnson, Writer

"It's wrong to kill"

Charles Evers, Activist

"For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal"

Carl Bernstein, Journalist

"For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men"

Albert Claude, Scientist

"Heroism in a bad cause"

Karel Reisz, Director

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