Ethics Quotations

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

Respect is what we owe; love, what we give.

If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate me. Let's get the dialogue going.

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.

I don't have a good work ethic. I have a real casual relationship with hours.

Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible.

My personal philosophy of life is one of ethics

I am fully aware that everybody has a right to succeed, and success should be with ethics.

It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

In just about every area of society, there's nothing more important than ethics.

Dare to be honest and fear no labor.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

We must promote solid traits such as work ethics, a dignified lifestyle, matching actions to rhetoric, performance rather than grandstanding.

We have also set up the national institute for ethics. This institute and also the implementation of the national integrity plan, that will certainly do the follow up that is necessary for this.

Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.

The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics.

The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.

Nothing gets a bigger laugh than when you refer to things like ethics or human rights.

Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

Nobody owes anybody a living, but everybody is entitled to a chance.

Great people have great values and great ethics.

Across professions, consistency is a direct product of work ethic.

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

I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions.

What I would like to do is to leave behind a sustainable entity of a set of companies that operate in an exemplary manner in terms of ethics, values and continue what our ancestors left behind.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

I'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.

I think it's very hard in this day and age to raise little girls with morals, ethics and values, and them knowing that they are precious creations and that they are important.

I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics.

Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.

I developed a really strong work ethic, and I don't take anything for granted.

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.

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

Apart from values and ethics which I have tried to live by, the legacy I would like to leave behind is a very simple one - that I have always stood up for what I consider to be the right thing, and I have tried to be as fair and equitable as I could be.

Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.

A people and their religion must be judged by social standards based on social ethics. No other standard would have any meaning if religion is held to be necessary good for the well-being of the people.

I guess maybe another gift I have is a great work ethic.

The American work ethic is something to be admired. Our workforce, regardless of position, works hard to produce the best product and serve customers to the best of their ability.

The jury had down right contempt for punk rock grass roots ethics.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

Things change so fast, you can't use 1971 ethics on someone born in 1971.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.

I'm a peaceful person once work ethic is established.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

People don't understand that when I grew up, I was never the most talented. I was never the biggest. I was never the fastest. I certainly was never the strongest. The only thing I had was my work ethic, and that's been what has gotten me this far.

A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.

The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

What's troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.

Even at school I studied ethics instead of religion.

Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

I have a work ethic. If I say I'm going to do something, I do it.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an 'ethic.'

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

So I think ethics is the broader thing that's less focused on prohibitions and is more perhaps looking at principles and questions and ideas about how to live your life.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

You don't carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.

I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.

When I'm doing something I love, I can lose sleep. I can go and go and go and go. My work ethic is pretty intense. But when it comes to doing something that I don't love every day, I'm not very good at it. That's called work, and I don't like work that much.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Whether they're able to do under the ethics statute or not, it's a plain conflict of interest.

We believe we will see improvement in the ethics and integrity of city government,

We know what we did was right and fine and within ethics rules, and we wanted a stamp of approval from the Ethics Committee.

Economics and ethics have little in common.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology.

.. that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.

I never met a winner who had a work ethic. Not somebody who says I have so much talent that naturally I won.

Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.

All ethical people strive to choose "right" over "easy" when confronted by situations that force them to choose one or the other.

If you want to find out how strong a company's ethics are, don't listen to what its people say, watch what they do.

Christianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion.

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

There are enough people that cared about ethics and integrity that Mr. DeLay was unable to go forward.

Whenever your life touches mine, you make me stronger of weaker... there is no escape... people drag others or lift others up.

We're having an ethics session in the first place because of these folks that got in trouble.

Let unswerving integrity be your watchword.

He who has a true idea, knows at that same time that he has a true idea, nor can he doubt concerning the truth of the thing.

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.

I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.