Quotes about Ethics

The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.

Any book which inspires us to lead a better life is a good book.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.

But if someone's character has no foundation, there's nothing to build on.

True independence and freedom can only exist in doing what's right.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore.

if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?" "Give him a good ducking, anyhow.

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?