Quotes on Ethics

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

Neither we, nor any other people, will ever be respected till we respect ourselves and we will never respect ourselves till we have the means to live respectfully.

The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.

Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.

He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying.

Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

We must never allow the voice of humanity within us to be silenced. It is humanity's sympathy with all creatures that first makes us truly human.

In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

I've always felt you don't have to be completely detached, emotionally uninvolved to make precise observations. There's nothing wrong with feeling great empathy for your subjects.

Pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of our own species.

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.

How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground? The meritocratic culture hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one - how to cultivate character.

Ethics is obedience to the unenforceable.

I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

[W]hen the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions.

For contemplation is both the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, because we are more capable of continuous contemplation than we are of any practical activity.

So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency.