Quotes about Ethics

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious convictions.

It is folly for a man who has a dead person in his house to leave him there and go to weep over his neighbor's dead."

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual, without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.