Philosophy & Thought: Ethics & Morality Quotes

"Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: Once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved"

Stanley Fish, Writer

"There is a contest old as Eden, which still goes on - the conflict between right and wrong, between error and truth. In this conflict, every human being has a part"

Matthew Simpson, Clergyman

"Human nature is the same now as when Adam hid from the presence of God; the consciousness of wrong makes us unwilling to meet those whom we have offended"

Matthew Simpson, Clergyman

"Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express"

George A. Smith, Clergyman

"Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"Keep talking about moving toxic wastes, but never let it cross your mind to quit producing them. Keep Judging yourselves in Manson. Don't look in the mirror. You will serve the Earth as much as she serves you, or you will commit suicide"

Lynette Fromme, Criminal

"Perchance the chemist is already damned and the guardian the blackest"

Lewis Gilbert, Director

"A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run"

Ouida, Novelist

"If you deny that any principles of conduct at all are common to and admitted by all men who try to behave reasonably - well, I don't see how you can have any ethics or any ethical background for law"

Frederick Pollock, Judge

"It is strange how little harm bad codes do"

Frederick Pollock, Judge

"There is a strong ethical dimension to the best comedy. Not only does it avoid reinforcing prejudices, it actively challenges them"

Steve Coogan, Comedian

"What we try to say is that it doesn't matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat or conservative or independent. You are equally responsible for your place in the culture, and you must make a contribution, and you must accept responsibility for what goes down on your watch"

Martin Sheen, Actor

"Everything we do affects other people"

Luke Ford, Writer

"Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time"

Renata Adler, Journalist

"As a politician who cherishes religious conviction in his personal sphere, but regards politics as a domain belonging outside religion, I believe that this view is seriously flawed"

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President

"The temptations to wrong are many; they spring out of a corrupt nature"

Matthew Simpson, Clergyman

"Bad guys don't think they're bad guys. Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany"

Martin Landau, Actor

"Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option"

Timothy McVeigh, Criminal

"Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values"

Theodore C. Sorensen, Lawyer

"Broad tolerance in the matter of beliefs is necessarily a part of the new ethics"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism"

Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Writer

"I see myself capable of arrogance and brutality... That's a fierce thing, to discover within yourself that which you despise the most in others"

George Stevens, Director

"Affliction is a school of virtue; it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning"

Francis Atterbury, Politician

"I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given"

Dennis C. Blair, Public Servant

"No politician has ever yet been able to rule his country, nor has any country ever yet been able to face the world, upon the principles of the Sermon on the Mount"

Frederick Scott Oliver, Writer

"A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack"

Frank Oz, Actor

"But, you know, the issues of humanity and what is fair treatment and good treatment of a fellow human being should not really be based on a personal sense of right and wrong or judgment"

Debbie Harry, Musician

"To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery"

Ouida, Novelist

"There's so few people in this town with a conscience"

Blake Edwards, Director

"Immoral is choosing not to act when you hold in your hands the power to create perfection"

Mark Crispin Miller, Journalist

"Relationships do not preclude issues of morality"

Jhumpa Lahiri, Author

"I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it Western, democratic and Christian"

Luke Ford, Writer

"Ultimately I think what people care about, particularly on an issue like Social Security, is not really what's right and what's left but what's right and what's wrong"

John Podesta, Lawyer

"My head can get to murder and rape for profit because I can understand greed as a human motive, but I cannot understand the voyeuristic desire to watch such a film. I can comprehend one and I cannot comprehend the other"

Donna Leon, Author

"I sometimes think God allows Great Britain to be unprincipled for the good of mankind"

Julia Ward Howe, Activist

"There's this idea that if you take your clothes off, somehow you must have loose morals"

Demi Moore, Actress

"The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values"

Norman Thomas, Activist

"Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?"

Clifford D. Simak, Writer

"In violent streets and broken homes, the cry of anguished souls is not for more laws, but for more conscience and character"

Cal Thomas, Journalist

"As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust"

Charles W. Chesnutt, Novelist

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