Quotes about Ethics

Our world is going through a crisis of dehumanization, breakup of family life, a general loss of moral values.

The very good people did not convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands - and you hated the things it asked of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before - and it's better than anything I've known.

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down.

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.

Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.

Well—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.

Archer's New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty. It was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened.

What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?

Seems to me it all boils down to one thing. Was this fellow we're supposing about under any obligation to the other party - the one he was trying to buy the property from?' Ralph hesitated. 'Only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently.' Mr. Spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest question.

Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life, in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms judgment.

A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.