Quotes about Ethics

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it--when unpopular.

Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

The man who speaks an injurious truth lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving. The

I] shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon second thought, I will not use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it.

Why shouldn't we be honest and honorable, and lie every time we get a chance? That is to say, why shouldn't we be consistent, and either lie all the time or not at all?

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.

My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying.

Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church.  More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat; more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatching his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give thanks, without even waiting to rob the body.

A Christian mother's first duty is to soil her child's mind, and she does not neglect it. Her lad grows up to be a missionary, and goes to the innocent savage and to the civilized Japanese, and soils their minds. Whereupon they adopt immodesty, they conceal their bodies, they stop bathing naked together.

I said it was a brutal thing. No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.

To be good is noble. To tell other people how to be good is even nobler and much less trouble.

I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.