Quotes about Ethics

The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

ANOTHER characteristic of the devil's moral theology is the exaggeration of all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions.

Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.

Go out into the world and do well; but more importantly—go out into the world and do good.

Tobacco, banjo playing, and dominoes do not figure in the Decalogue as recorded in the Book of Exodus. But particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Christians have been adept, and remarkably inventive, at interpreting God's commandments to cover just about anything they don't approve of. The effect, of course, is to make the surpassingly large God of the scriptures into a petty Cosmic Patrolman.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.