Quotes about Ethics

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

In today's society, looking good and feeling good often trumps doing good and being good. And some people don't know the difference anymore.

In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty - all are responsible.

Without God, there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience... without God, there is a coarsening of the society; without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.

If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.

Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.

Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.