Quotes about Ethics

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good.

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

When a man says money can do anything that settles it: he hasn't got any. When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

your uncle Howard is one of the most harmless of men—much nicer than most professional people. Of course he does dreadful things as a judge; but then if you take a man and pay him 5,000 pounds a year to be wicked, and praise him for it, and have policemen and courts and laws and juries to drive him into it so that he can't help doing it, what can you expect?

The faults of the burglar are the qulaities of the financier.

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. [ Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming, The Westminster Review, 1885. ]

But I wasn't worth doing wrong for---- nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.

Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.