Quotes about Ethics

The only thing I am really clear about in the whole problem is that a 'culture' that breaks down in the face of danger is no culture.

It was Bonhoeffer and his friends who proved by their resistance unto death that even in the age of the nation-state there are loyalties which transcend those to state and nation.

He opposed the militaristic nationalism of the new Germany, rooted in "blood and soil," even as the German Evangelical Church and most of its leaders succumbed to the new ideology. By the early period of the war, the embrace of Nazi ideology at all levels of society had led to the complete corruption of social and personal ethical behavior among most Germans.

The fact that he was ashamed when he was discovered praying was for Kant an argument against prayer. He failed to see that prayer by its very nature is a matter for the strictest privacy, and he failed to perceive the fundamental significance of shame for human existence.

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Better to be a beggar in freedom than to be forced into compromises against my conscience. —

On the other hand, every virtue and every good deed turns worthless if pride creeps into it - which happens whenever in some fashion we glory in our goodness.

In philosophy seminars, the choice is usually between good and evil. In the real world, however, the choice is often between a bad guy and a worse guy.

You don't even have to believe in anything to be good to people. You should just know you should be a good human being.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

Christian ethics is not primarily an individualistic, one-on-one-with-God brand of personal holiness; rather it has to do with living the life of the Spirit in Christian community and in the world.