Quotes about ethics (900 quotes, page 6)

“Condoleezza Rice: I think that these historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober look from historians and what we've encouraged the Turks and the Armenians to do is to have joint historical commissions that can look at this, to have efforts to examine their past and, in examining their past, to get over their past.
Adam Schiff:… you come out of academia… is there any reputable historian you're aware of that takes issue with the fact that the murder of 1.5 million Armenians constituted genocide?
Condoleezza Rice: Congressman, I come out of academia, but I'm secretary of state now and I think that the best way to have this proceed is for the United States not to be in the position of making this judgment, but rather for the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this.
Adam Schiff:… Why is it only this genocide? Is it because Turkey is a strong ally? Is that an ethical and moral reason to ignore the murder of 1.5 million people? Why is it we don't say, "Let's relegate the Holocaust to historians" or "relegate the Cambodian genocide or Rwandan genocide?" Why is it only this genocide that we should let the Turks acknowledge or not acknowledge?
Condoleezza Rice: Congressman, we have recognized and the president recognizes every year in a resolution that he himself issues the historical circumstances and the tragedy that befell the Armenian people at that time…
Adam Schiff:… You recognize more than anyone, as a diplomat, the power of words. And I'm sure you supported the recognition of genocide in Darfur, not calling it tragedy, not calling it atrocity, not calling it anything else, but the power and significance of calling it genocide. Why is that less important in the case of the Armenian genocide?
Condoleezza Rice: Congressman, the power here is in helping these people to move forward… And, yes, Turkey is a good ally and that is important. But more important is that like many historical tragedies, like many historical circumstances of this kind, people need to come to terms with it and they need to move on.
Adam Schiff:… Iran hosts conferences of historians on the Holocaust. I don't think we want to get in the business of encouraging conferences of historians on the undeniable facts of the Armenian genocide.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

Appropriations hearing before the Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs http://schiff.house.gov/news/press-releases/schiff-presses-secretary-of-state-rice-on-armenian-genocide-recognition, March 21, 2007.

People , Way , Business , Support

““Your frontier ethics are so rawboned, Miss Edwards, as rough-hewn and clumsy as the log cabin in which you must have been raised.” Mrs. Stanton’s face was like marble as she spoke; only her lips moved with ugly precision. “Decency is striving for perfection in a world in which every other hoglike creature satisfies himself with sloppiness and indulgence. Decency is not in failing to murder someone. It’s in murdering the right person, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught.””

M. K. Hobson (1969) American writer

Source: The Hidden Goddess (2011), Chapter 13, “Red Hand, Gold-Colored Eye” (pp. 221-222)

World , Family , Personality , Perfection

“On the empiric plane the Gītā teaches theism; it is not, then, surprising to find—still on the empiric plane—an emphasis on ethics absent from the earlier Upaniṣads. Krishna is never weary of telling Arjuna to be virtuous; his own sympathies are decidedly on the side of righteousness; it is to reestablish right when wrong prevails that he takes birth as man.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 45. (24. Good and Evil)

Birth

“What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Conservation" (c. 1938); Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 157.
1930s

Education , Understanding , Universe

“He [Marcus Aurelius Antoninus] advises us to examine well all the impressions on our minds and to form a right judgment of them, to make just conclusions, and to inquire into the meanings of words, and so far to apply Dialectic, but he has no attempt at any exposition of Dialectic, and his philosophy is in substance purely moral and practical. …an examination implies a use of Dialectic, which Antoninus accordingly employed as a means towards establishing his Physical, Theological, and Ethical principles.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

The Philosophy of Antoninus

“First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.”

Bertolt Brecht The Threepenny Opera

The Threepenny Opera (1928)

“While it is much preferable to anarchy, government cannot abolish the evils of the human condition. At any time the state is only one of the forces that shape human behaviour, and its power is never absolute. At present, fundamentalist religion and organized crime, ethnic-national allegiances and market forces all have the ability to elude the control of government, sometimes to overthrow or capture it. States are at the mercy of events as much as any other human institution, and over the longer course of history all of them fail. As Spinoza recognized, there is no reason to think the cycle of order and anarchy will ever end. Secular thinkers find this view of human affairs dispiriting, and most have retreated to some version of the Christian view in which history is a narrative of redemption. The most common of these narratives are theories of progress, in which the growth of knowledge enables humanity to advance and improve its condition. Actually, humanity cannot advance or retreat, for humanity cannot act: there is no collective entity with intentions or purposes, only ephemeral struggling animals each with its own passions and illusions. The growth of scientific knowledge cannot alter this fact. Believers in progress – whether social democrats or neo-conservatives, Marxists, anarchists or technocratic Positivists – think of ethics and politics as being like science, with each step forward enabling further advances in future. Improvement in society is cumulative, they believe, so that the elimination of one evil can be followed by the removal of others in an open-ended process. But human affairs show no sign of being additive in this way: what is gained can always be lost, sometimes –as with the return of torture as an accepted technique in war and government – in the blink of an eye. Human knowledge tends to increase, but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism, and while the growth of knowledge allows them to improve their material conditions, it also increases the savagery of their conflicts.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 264-5)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

War , Religion , Way , History

“It is relatively easy to control your anger after a while, but to do that after facing such extremes and at the height of your troubles, when you are wearied and exhausted, when you are heart-broken and depressed, that is sublime morality and magnificent ethics.”

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

Heart , Anger

“It is true that the politician at the moment of his actions or if he explains his actions and justifies them cannot provide at the same time also great philosophy. But if he acts without philosophical and ethical foundations, he is in danger of making mistakes. He is in danger to sink into opportunism. He is even in danger of being a charlatan.”

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982

Weggefährten - Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, Siedler-Verlag Berlin 1996, S. 156, ISBN 9783442755158, ISBN 978-3442755158

Time

“Not only in the realm of the ethical world, and of economy, but also in that of natural phenomena, the realistic orientation of theoretical research can lead only to "real types" and "empirical laws." And in the above point of view, at any rate, no essential difference between the ethical and the natural sciences exists, but at most only one of degree. The realistic orientation of theoretical research excludes in principle, rather, in all realms of the world of phenomena the possibility of arriving at strict (exact) theoretical knowledge.”

Carl Menger (1840–1921) founder of the Austrian School of economics

Source: Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, 1883, p. 58

World , Law , Nature , Knowledge

“In ethics Keynes was a Platonist, in politics he was an Aristotelian. His ethics pointed him towards the ideal; his politics towards moderation.”

Robert Skidelsky (1939) Economist and author

Source: John Maynard Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009), Ch. 7 : Keynes's Politics

“So I read about various aspects of vegetarianism—the scientific aspect, the humane aspect, the ethical aspect, and the economic aspect. The more I studied, the more convinced I became that it was a logical procedure, that it would help humanity, that it would lessen the suffering of the animals, and that it would help this country.”

Gordon Latto (doctor) (1911–1998)

Interview in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Autumn Press, 1979), p. 123.

Study , Suffering , Reading , Help

“Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the [United States] government had striven to show poeple around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition ISBN 978-0-241-97289-2, pages 83-84.
No Place to Hide (2014)

World , Law

“Among the many prejudices against vegans is the belief that they are always preaching to others and trying to convert them. I do not think that is true; we are incredibly tolerant. We are always polite when others ask, “Don’t you ever get tempted by a bacon sandwich?”… In fact, most vegans I know are rather coy about explaining why they are vegan, mostly because the question tends to be asked when we are sitting a dinner table full of meat eaters, and it seems rather impolite to answer. However, seeing as we are not at a dinner party now, here is the ethical case… If people are vegetarians for ethical reasons—because they believe that killing and eating animals is wrong—they really ought to be vegan, too. The average human eats more than 11,000 animals in his or her lifetime, but millions of calves and chicks are also killed every year as “waste products” of milk and egg production.”

Kerry McCarthy (1965) British politician

Debate on World Vegan Day http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm111101/debtext/111101-0004.htm#1111025000002 (transcript in www.parliament.uk), House of Commons, 1 November 2011

People , Question , Thinking , Animals

“We need a philosophy of the individual in society and a political culture that values the social goods that give security, meaning and value to people: home, family, friendships, good work, locality and communities of belonging. These were the concerns of the 19th century debates between social liberals and ethical socialists which created the modern spirit of the left. We need to re-invent a plural and ethical socialism rooted in the ordinary life of the individual producing and relating in society. The central value of this socialism, alongside liberty, is equality.”

Jon Cruddas (1962) British politician

Tribune Magazine, Building the future politics on our toxic present, 15 June 2009 http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2009/06/building-the-future-politics-on-our-toxic-present/

Life , Friendship , People , Family

“Self-destructive addiction is merely the medium for desperate people to internalize their frustration, resistance, and powerlessness. In other words, we can safely ignore the drug hysteria that periodically sweeps through the United States. Instead we should focus our ethical concerns and political energies on the contradictions posed by the persistence of inner-city poverty in the midst of extraordinary opulence. In the same vein, we need to recognize and dismantle the class- and ethnic-based apartheids that riddle the U. S. landscape.”

Philippe Bourgois (1956) American anthropologist

Source: In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1995), Ch. 9: Conclusion (p. 319)

People

“When he was a little boy, my father had a dog – a German shepherd named Rex. He was very fond of the dog and would ride around the garden on its back. Around the same time, the Rowlands family also had a pig. History does not record the name of this pig, and perhaps it never had a name. But, nameless or not, my father was very fond of it and would ride around the garden on its back. Rex, by all accounts, lived a long and happy life. Things went a little differently for the pig. I relate this story not only because it provided my first brush with the idea of animal rights ('What happened to the pig, Dad?') but also because, if you look closely enough, you will find the basic moral case for animals encapsulated tightly within it. Ethics is many things, but it's hardly rocket science. In the end, most of it is pretty obvious. The moral case for animals … is about as obvious as this: the differential treatment of Rex and pig is a bit strange.”

Mark Rowlands (1962) British philosopher

Animal Rights: All That Matters https://books.google.it/books?id=6YA3R0J69E8C&pg=PT0 (Hachette UK, 2013), ch. 1.

Life , Family , Dogs , History

“Ethics must not remain a lovely abstraction; it must be concretized into valid truth. At this point ethics joins forces with religion because ethics too has ultimately no other recourse but to hypothesize the idea of God: not for the personal redemption of the moral individual but as a guarantee for the eventual realization of morality in this world.”

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) German philosopher

Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 122

Love , God , Truth , World

“You know who doesn't like that bit? Cops. They don't like it. They don't like it. And I think its important -- I'm being sincere. I think its important that we acknowledge, all of us, that there are plenty of good, decent, ethical, very brave cops, who put their lives on the line every day, and they don't appreciate being painted with this broad brush as being violent predators just because of the actions of a minority of their brothers. They don't like being stereotyped so that when you see blue, you just think "Oh, violent thug."”

David Cross (1964) American comedian, writer and actor

They don't appreciate it.
Making America Great Again

Thinking , Painting , Sincerity

“To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. That is the law of life, individual and social. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life , Law , Parent , Future

“My work ethic is rigorous, brutal, and uncompromising. I've had my pension plans in place for a long time and I never spend more than I have or forget to pay my tax bills. My repressed, inner Protestant is an absolute Godsend in that respect. I also have lots of highly-paid and well-regarded work outside the comics field now and with Jupiter in the second house on my horoscope, I shouldn't have to worry too much about my dotage. I love the future and it loves me.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2003
http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597
On himself

Love , Time , Future , Housing

“Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 155.

“The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D. C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”

Nancy Pelosi (1940) American politician, first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, born 1940

Source: Post-election comments, 2006-11-7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110700473.html

People , History

“Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 252, quoted in Leonard Silk (1976) The Economists. New York: Basic Books. p. 208

Problem

“Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will—extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom.”

Thomas Nagel (1937) American philosopher

Source: The View From Nowhere (1986), p. 135.

Motivation

“.. the gift of Orthodoxia : The call by the Christ not to be just good moral and ethical beings, which is where the western Churches stop- but to go beyond that, to be 'theanthropic", to reflect the generosity and magnificence and beauty of the Christ.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

Beauty , Christ

“Whether God can make the past not to have been?
Objection 1: It seems that God can make the past not to have been. For what is impossible in itself is much more impossible than that which is only impossible accidentally. But God can do what is impossible in itself, as to give sight to the blind, or to raise the dead. Therefore, and much more can He do what is only impossible accidentally. Now for the past not to have been is impossible accidentally: thus for Socrates not to be running is accidentally impossible, from the fact that his running is a thing of the past. Therefore God can make the past not to have been.
Objection 2: Further, what God could do, He can do now, since His power is not lessened. But God could have effected, before Socrates ran, that he should not run. Therefore, when he has run, God could effect that he did not run.
Objection 3: Further, charity is a more excellent virtue than virginity. But God can supply charity that is lost; therefore also lost virginity. Therefore He can so effect that what was corrupt should not have been corrupt. On the contrary, Jerome says (Ep. 22 ad Eustoch.): "Although God can do all things, He cannot make a thing that is corrupt not to have been corrupted." Therefore, for the same reason, He cannot effect that anything else which is past should not have been.
I answer that, As was said above (Q[7], A[2]), there does not fall under the scope of God's omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction. Now that the past should not have been implies a contradiction. For as it implies a contradiction to say that Socrates is sitting, and is not sitting, so does it to say that he sat, and did not sit. But to say that he did sit is to say that it happened in the past. To say that he did not sit, is to say that it did not happen. Whence, that the past should not have been, does not come under the scope of divine power. This is what Augustine means when he says (Contra Faust. xxix, 5): "Whosoever says, If God is almighty, let Him make what is done as if it were not done, does not see that this is to say: If God is almighty let Him effect that what is true, by the very fact that it is true, be false": and the Philosopher says (Ethic. vi, 2): "Of this one thing alone is God deprived---namely, to make undone the things that have been done."
Reply to Objection 1: Although it is impossible accidentally for the past not to have been, if one considers the past thing itself, as, for instance, the running of Socrates; nevertheless, if the past thing is considered as past, that it should not have been is impossible, not only in itself, but absolutely since it implies a contradiction. Thus, it is more impossible than the raising of the dead; in which there is nothing contradictory, because this is reckoned impossible in reference to some power, that is to say, some natural power; for such impossible things do come beneath the scope of divine power.
Reply to Objection 2: As God, in accordance with the perfection of the divine power, can do all things, and yet some things are not subject to His power, because they fall short of being possible; so, also, if we regard the immutability of the divine power, whatever God could do, He can do now. Some things, however, at one time were in the nature of possibility, whilst they were yet to be done, which now fall short of the nature of possibility, when they have been done. So is God said not to be able to do them, because they themselves cannot be done.
Reply to Objection 3: God can remove all corruption of the mind and body from a woman who has fallen; but the fact that she had been corrupt cannot be removed from her; as also is it impossible that the fact of having sinned or having lost charity thereby can be removed from the sinner.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

Summa Theologica Question 25 Article 6 http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.FP_Q25_A4.html
Summa Theologica (1265–1274), Unplaced by chapter

God , Nature , Time , Past

“For anyone seeking meaning for his life a figure from Greek mythology comes to mind. It is that of Atlas, bearing with endless perseverance the weight of the heavens on his back. — Atlas, resolutely bearing his burden and accepting his responsibility that gives us the example we seek. To seek out and accept responsibility; to persevere; to be committed to excellence; to be creative and courageous; to be unrelenting in the pursuit of intellectual development; to maintain high standards of ethics and morality; and to bring these basic principles of existence to bear through active participation in life — these are some of my ideas on the goals which must be met to achieve meaning and purpose in life.
And finally, the man who knows his purpose in life accepts praise humbly. He knows whatsoever talents we has were given him by the Lord and that these talents must be developed and used. In this way man renders thanks for the Lord's gift — and finds meaning in his life.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1974)

Life , Way , Idea , Courage

“If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 125

Truth , Learning

“With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 39

Motivation

“The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 157

“In the writings of such "pagan" philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of "sensibility." But it was not until after the age of Rousseau, from which must be dated the great humanitarian movement of the past century, that Vegetarianism began to assert itself as a system, a reasoned plea for the disuse of flesh-food.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

Age , School , Food , Literature

“Many years ago I heard a paper read by a colleague who was very philosophically astute and informed. The paper was on ethics, and it was rigorously argued, proper distinctions were made, and the critique of other points of view was cogent. … When my colleague finished his paper the man chairing the meeting said, "That's not ethics. Ethics has to do with prophecy. I learned that from Rabbi Abraham Heschel."”

James Gustafson (1925) American academic

Source: "Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and Policy", p. 47

Learning , Reading

“According to self-actualization ethics, it is every person’s primary responsibility first to discover the daimon within him and thereafter to live in accordance with it.”

David L. Norton (1930–1995) American philosopher

Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 16

Personality

“I would almost consider myself a canonical child of Generation X… because I think there is an ethic and aesthetic that goes along with that generation, it may have something to do with the fact that "Never Mind the Bollocks" was released when we were 16-years-old and that was really the album that crystalized a generation.”

Mark Pesce (1962) American writer

An Afternoon with Mark Pesce: The Uncut Version http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/interview.html

Thinking

“There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

People , Mathematics , Personality , Perfection

“It is only the densest ethical ignorance that talks about a "Christian business" life; for business is now intrinsically evil.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 26

Life , Business , Evil

“Uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem

Despair

“The interlacedness of the two heterogeneous origins [Remark: This refers to the origins of governance: (1) necessity to work cooperatively, (2) the fight between man and man] prevails as the fundamental characteristic of governance. Therefore even any true community, being successful somewhere between boundaries for a common purpose, elsewhere becomes in theory a means for misleading, used to interpret and cover-up actually existing power. Again and again things are named by their contrary and are hidden. In that manner, under the pretense of communication - the open discussion - people are interrogated and commands are given, under the pretense of freedom and voluntariness behavior is enforced, in the coat of pure ethics the evil is carried out, under the pretense of truth lies and fraud are committed, and all values valid at any one time are, depending on the situation, either applied or ignored. [Remarks: "Herrschaft" = "governance" or "leadership", "Gewalt" = "power" or "violence"]”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

On Truth (1948), Pt 2, Ch. 3, II, B, 3, b)

People , Truth , Behavior , Communication

“My main problem was, naturally, religion: from it I moved later on to the principles of ethics. First to be examined was my positive religion [ie. Judaism]. It collapsed. So I wanted to base myself on naturaly religion: but my agony was so great, that this [foundation] also collapsed before my eyes. Nothing, nothing remained. I was the most miserable person in the world. I became an atheist.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Hess' Diary p. 40

World , Religion , Nature , Problem

“The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

2000s, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)

World , Confidence

“Many people, no doubt, honestly believe that they are only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France. … You have to consider the character of the Nazi movement and the rule which it implies. The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations with the German people. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi Power, that Power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That Power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/05/policy-of-his-majestys-government#column_370 in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement
The 1930s

Friendship , People , Pleasure , Fear

“There are major issues that people - as taxpayers and voters - will have to make informed decisions on in the near future. They will need to understand the science and the ethical considerations to form their opinions. Some of these are issues that will affect humanity for decades to come.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, 'The Science Guy' returns to tackle issues for older audience, Journal Gazette, Mattoon, Illinois, June 8, 2005, Associated Press]

People , Understanding , Decision , Science

“From what can "ought" be derived. The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most compelling facts about human nature -n novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that out ethical principles don't clash irrationally with the way the world is.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

World , Way , Nature , Sense

“Ethics is the science of duties, and it's principles, perceived by reason, and revealed to us by conscience.”

Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869) Indo-Portuguese physician, writer, historian, economist, political scientist and MP in the Portuguese parli…

Essai sur la théorie de l'économie politique et de ses rapports avec la morale et le droit. (1867). Quoted by Teotonio R. de Souza in Indo-Portuguese history (1985), p. 210
Essai sur la théorie de l'économie politique et de ses rapports avec la morale et le droit (1867)

Science

“One has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless community of human beings that strive for truth. … I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein's God (1997), p. 98

God , People , Truth , Feeling

“[Religion] is predominantly evil and entirely deceitful, has only negative correlations statistically, and is frequently maliciously abusive physically mentally and emotionally. It has historically always obstructed education and retarded or impeded progress in whatever application it has ever touched. All the worst atrocities in history were done in the name of religion and our greatest advances were made in opposition to it. I’m an antitheist because religion is factually historically ethically and morally wrong.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Anti-theist Answers to Christian Questions http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2015/11/22/anti-theist-answers-to-christian-questions/ (November 22, 2015)

Education , Religion , History , Evil

“The practice of declaring people FAIR GAME will cease. FAIR GAME may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations.
This P/L does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an SP.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

"Cancellation of Fair Game" (21 October 1968).
Scientology Policy Letters

People , Game , Appearance

“The moral hero, guided as he or she is by the ethical experience, who carves out an adventurous path is akin to the discoverer who brings order into the scattered elements of a science or the artist who composes a piece of music or designs buildings.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Music , Science

“The decay of our culture since 1941 can be measured by the fact that academic historians today are no longer interested in historical truth or interested in it only marginally; what really interests them is jobs. They match the anthropologists and geneticists who, with practiced effrontery, can say that all races are equal and there is no difference between them. There are now 'scientists' who boast they are so versatile they can prove anything, for a suitable fee, while others abuse spectroscopes to prove that a painted rag is a 'Holy Shroud,' or use quantum mechanics to prove that the old Jew-god converted mud into Adam. 'Truth' is whatever pays the most. The academicians have conformed to what is now the American ethic. Whether any nation so decadent and depraved can or should survive is a question I am unwilling to consider.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"A World Grown Grey With Their Breath", Liberty Bell magazine (January 1988)
1970s, 1980s

God , Truth , Question , Painting

“Ethical individualism… is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life.”

Rudolf Steiner book Philosophy of Freedom

Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 12

Life

“I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations.”

John Varley book The Barbie Murders

"Picnic on Nearside", in Peter Crowther ed. Tales in Space, p. 286

Religion , History , Idea , Childhood

“Being law-abiding means filing a paper on time, not parking near a hydrant, and getting a zoning variance before moving a fence on one's own property. A world continually tighter in these ways intensifies the search for loopholes, tempts the unscrupulous to invent them, hardens the cynic, and keeps alive the urge to break loose. Such pulses of thought and feeling are bound to take away the ease and pleasure of ethical conduct. Habitual morality is baffled by the stop-and-go, and people's disregard of injunctions causes no surprise; it seems rather to show firmness of mind.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

"The Bugbear of Relativism," p. 98
The Culture We Deserve (1989)

People , Pleasure , World , Law

“I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Love , Life , People , Truth

““Neither of us is very trustworthy, eh?”
“Pfutz!” Reich said emphatically. “We don’t play girl’s rules. We play for keeps, both of us. It’s the cowards and weaklings and sore-losers who hide behind rules and fair play.”
“What about honor and ethics?”
“We’ve got honor in us, but it’s our own code… not the make-believe rules some frightened little man wrote for the rest of the frightened little men. Every man’s got his own honor and ethics, and so long as he sticks to ’em, who’s anybody else to point the finger? You may not like his ethics, but you've no right to call him unethical.””

Alfred Bester book The Demolished Man

Source: The Demolished Man (1953), Chapter 6 (p. 84).

Men , Girl

“I try to live by proper ethical and moral standards and carry out my national duties in accordance with the principles of the God I believe in.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Additional remarks about the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, Address to the Editors' Forum, Suva, 27 July 2005

God

“Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 490)

God , Religion , Justice , Sense

“Humanities and science are not something mutually contradictory but complimentary. One should realize the fact that science is devoid of values especially moral and ethical values. Science is a system of philosophy without ethics. Science devoid of ethical judgment becomes an ally of everyone – of the good as well as the bad and is of service in changing the world into a paradise or reducing it to a veritable hell.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Source: Philosophy of Education, p. 86.

World , Hell , Science , Change

“We cannot solve ethical questions of the twentieth century by looking at what Jesus did in the first. Our choices are not the same as his. Being Christians does not mean following 'in his steps.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), p. 139

Question

“[We] will discuss Soul and Body, the doctrine of God, and Ethics. …We shall find that Leibniz no longer shows great originality, but tends, with slight alterations of phraseology, to adopt (without acknowledgment) the views of the decried Spinoza. We shall find also many more minor inconsistencies than in the earlier part of [Leibniz's] system, these being due chiefly to the desire to avoid the impieties of the Jewish Atheist, and the still greater impieties to which Leibniz's own logic should have led him.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz https://archive.org/details/cu31924052172271 (1900) Ch. 1, Leibniz's Premisses, p, 5.
M - R

God , Soul , Parting

“The problem of systems improvement is the problem of the 'ethics of the whole system.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 4

Problem

“We must understand that the fact of error, demonstrated in subsequent work, does not suggest that ethical lapses are responsible. It is more likely that the source of error is, as the advertisement says, a reflection of the fact that "its dangerous to trifle with Mother Nature."”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

1994, p. 45
Integrity in Science (1985)

Error , Understanding , Nature

“Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists—to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.”

B.F. Skinner book Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, New York: Knopf, 1971 p. 155

Teachers

“The best ethics course is to handcuff one of the bastards.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

On Enron, meeting with his Corporate Responsibility Task Force, published by Wall Street Journal, and republished by Buffalo News https://archive.is/20130628093222/www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-32611018_ITM and Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds By William S. Laufer http://books.google.com/books?id=RLwjP0ySmNcC&pg=PA263&sig=W1mDN3zZNfaEoqHM_5CM0EafB-E&dq=wall+street+journal+the-best-ethics-course-is-to-handcuff+%22September+27,+2002%22+%22See+John+R.+Wilke,+President+Praises+Work+of+Task+Force+on+Business+Crime,+Wall+Street+Journal,+September+27,+2002,+p.+%22. (July 12, 2002).
2000s, 2002

“The ethical life… is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society… Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Idle Hands" (p. 127)
Modern Culture (2000)

Life , Youth

“The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 162.

Life , Women

“There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del mal cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinito.
"Avatars of the Tortoise"
Variant translations:
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.
There is a concept that is the corruptor and dazzler of others. I'm not talking about the evil whose limited empire is the ethic; I'm talking about infinity.
There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.
Discussion (1932)

Evil

“It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. […] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. […] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions—for these are our issues, not nature's.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Unenchanted Evening", p. 39
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

People , Stupidity , Question , Nature

“We were all at one time in darkness and we sought the eternal light and the enlightened ones among us got that light. The light that we got is not merely the light of intellectual illumination that Diogenes referred to, but also the light of ethical perfection, a better set of morals, a higher code of ethics and better living standards based on charity, helpfulness and sympathy.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In his address to the members of the Masonic Fraternity on the occassion of his joining as member of the Masonic Lodge. quoted in "Article # 14 Initiate responds to his Toast R.W.Bro. Jaya Chamaraja Wadeyar".

Light , Time , Help , Perfection

“In order to understand the meaning of the phrase dialogue among civilizations as defined here, one has no choice but to closely pay attention to a number of points one of which is the relationship between a politician and an artist, and the other is the relationship between ethics and politics.”

Mohammad Khatami (1943) Iranian prominent reformist politician, scholar and shiite faqih.

UNESCO 1999
Attributed

Understanding

“Ethic is the core of humanity and the foundation of civilization.”

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

“[W]e should be clear that neither genuine religious nor genuine moral impulses will ever be expressed in terms that tie the two essentially together. If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you’ve reduced us to the ethical level of 4 year olds. "If you follow these commandments you’ll go to heaven, if you don’t' you'll burn in hell" is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children.”

Susan Neiman (1955) American academic

Beyond Belief conference (November 2006)

Children , Religion , Hell

“Identify an agrarian problem—greenhouse gas emissions, overuse of antibiotics and dangerous pesticides, genetically modified crops, salmonella, E. coli, waste disposal, excessive use of water—and trace it to its ultimate origin and you will likely find an animal. … Research shows that veganism, which obviates the inherent waste involved in growing the grains used to fatten animals for food in conventional systems, is seven times more energy efficient than eating meat and, if embraced globally, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from conventional agriculture by 94 percent. … But with rare exception, those in the big, lumpy tent have thrown down a red carpet for “ethical butchers” while generally dismissing animal rights advocates as smug ascetics (which they can be) and crazed activists (ditto) who are driven more by sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed reason. It’s an easy move to make. But the problem with this dismissal—and the overall refusal to address the ethics of killing animals for food—is that it potentially anchors the Food Movement’s admirable goals in the shifting sands of an unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s call it the “omnivore’s contradiction.””

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Loving Animals to Death: How Can We Raise Them Humanely and Then Butcher Them?", in The American Scholar (Spring 2014) https://theamericanscholar.org/loving-animals-to-death/.

Food , Problem , Water , Time

“I saw that the writers on vegetarianism had examined the question very minutely, attacking it in its religious, scientific, practical and medical aspects. Ethically they had arrived at the conclusion that man's supremacy over the lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Part I, Chapter 17, Experiments in Dietetics
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)

Question , Animals

“Rushdie had written a book of nonfiction which offered critical but decided support to the Nicaraguan revolution. He had also been eloquent about the rights of the ever-relegated Palestinians. What more natural, when he was threatened with assassination by contract, than to jubilate about a terrorist-symp who had been caught in his own logic? I counted some ten newspaper and magazine columns from the Podhoretz school, all making this same point in the same words — demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the AIDS crisis as a vengeance as on sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got beyond mere gloating, and will one day help to illustrate the essential distinction between irony and brutish sarcasm.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Siding with Rushdie" (1989).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Books , School , Support , Revenge

“If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. xxix

Life , Health , Disease , Idea

“And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.”

H. G. Wells book Anticipations

Anticipations (1902)

Life , Death , Men , Pain

“While those who lusted for undeserved power, and their many misguided followers, were embarked upon a malignant enterprise against their homeland and its leaders, most successors to ancient warriors and the ethically naked but finely attired retailers of divine wisdom sank deeper into the ashes of their own vice.”

Vijay R. Singh (1931–2006) Fijian politician

Speaking Out (2006)

Wisdom

“I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.”

Thomas Jefferson book Jefferson Bible

Letter to Charles Thomson (9 January 1816), on his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefJesu.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (the "Jefferson Bible"), which omits all Biblical passages asserting Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and resurrection. Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 498–499
1810s

Books , Beauty , Time , Drawing

“We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world — temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. […] Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics.”

John Steinbeck book The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Source: The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), Chapter 4

Men , World , Singing

“Ethic- is especially important while conducting business, in law suits and trials, when people act rudely, etc.”

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

People , Law , Business

“Moses is the keystone to every man's ethical code. He was the first man of record in history to conceive of the law as separate from the will of a ruler, to choose whether a man should live by grace of law, or law by grace of man. In a literal sense Moses lives at every council table today.”

Charlton Heston (1923–2008) American actor

Los Angeles Times interview (1956)

Law , History , Sense

“We are faced this year with the choice between the "work ethic" that built this Nation's character and the new "welfare ethic" that could cause that American character to weaken.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Labor Day Message to the nation http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3557 (3 September 1972)
1970s

“Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

People , Thinking , Drawing

“I’m tired of being told that I have to “spread the wealth around” to people who don’t have my work ethic. I’m tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it.”

Robert A. Hall (1946) American politician

I'm Tired (February 19, 2009)

Money , People , Stupidity , Wealth

“This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Secret , Lying , Idea , Time

“Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

[Paraphrasing Kant] p. 162.
Sex and Character (1903)

World

“May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? May we say that it is not believing in the other life which causes a man to be good, but rather that being good causes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These states belong to the sphere of ethics, not of religion; or rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good [forgivable] though doing evil, to religion?”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

Life , Religion , Forgiveness , Evil

“A people without an agreed-upon common basis to their actions is neither a community nor a nation. A people with a common ethic is a nation wherever they live. Thus, the place of habitation is secondary to a shared belief in the establishment of an harmonious world community. Just as we can select a global range of plants for a garden, we can select from all extant ethics and beliefs those elements that we see to be sustainable, useful, and beneficial to life and to our community.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 14.2

Life , People , World , Communication

“As technology puts the God-wand into the hands of mankind, new ethical issues never before facing us pose harrowing decisions.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

State of the Art (2000)

God , Decision

“Mr. Neo-Angular – I am doing my duty. My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling. Vertue – I know that a rule is to be obeyed because it is a rule and not because it appeals to my feelings at the moment.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 90
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Feeling

“An officer corps, my West Point education emphasized, must have a code of ethics that tolerates no lying, no cheating, no stealing, no immorality, no killing other than that recognized under international rules of war and essential for military victory. Yet I also learned to my chagrin that there are those who fail the standards and that the code must be constantly policed. I saw failures at West Point, and for all my preventive efforts, I also saw failures among those who subsequently served under my command. Yet if an officer corps is to serve the nation as it should, firm dedication to a high moral code must always be the goal. One of the most exciting events of my plebe year was the commencement address by the Army Chief of Staff, General MacArthur, who was much as any man extolled such a code. Already a distinguished soldier even before World War II and the Korean War, General MacArthur spoke at a time when pacifism and economy imperiled the military services and the nation's security. While warning against misguided pacifism and politically inspired economy, he spoke of West Point as "the soul of the Army."”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

"The military code that you perpetuate," he said, "has come down to us from even before the age of knighthood and chivalry. It will stand the test of any code of ethics or philosophy."
Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 11.

War , Age , World , Education