Quotes on Ethics

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

The happiness and unhappiness of men depends as much on their ethics as on fortune.

Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.

The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.

A man may not transgress the bounds of major morals, but may make errors in minor morals.

Without "ethical culture", there is no salvation for humanity.

Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

Our distrust is very expensive.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

The meaning that we are seeking in evolution is its meaning to us, to man. The ethics of evolution must be human ethics. It is one of the many unique qualities of man, the new sort of animal, that he is the only ethical animal. The ethical need and its fulfillment are also products of evolution, but they have been produced in man alone.

The scientific doctrine of progress is destined to replace not only the myth of progress, but all other myths of human earthly destiny. It will inevitably become one of the cornerstones of man's theology, or whatever may be the future substitute for theology, and the most important external support for human ethics.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach.

The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.