Quotes about Ethics

It is fair, therefore, to assume that growing rationality is a guarantee of man's growing morality.

It is fair, therefore, to assume that growing rationality is a guarantee of man's growing morality.

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the ethical impotency of the modern church than its failure to deal with the evils and ethical problems of stock manipulation. Millions in property values are created by pure legerdemain. Stock dividends, watered stock and excessive rise in stock values, due to the productivity of the modern machine, are accepted by the church without murmur if only a slight return is made by the beneficiaries through church philanthropies [1927].

Absolutism, in both religious and political realism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations.

Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.

comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable

Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.

Hypocrisy is a proud desire to appear better than you are. Be thoroughly humbled and vile in your own eyes, and hypocrisy is done.

It is a palpable error of some ministers, who make such a disproportion between their preaching and their living; who study hard to preach exactly, and study little or not at all to live exactly.

Of two duties we must choose the greater, though of two sins we must choose neither (556).

What else is the law made for, but to be the rule of life, and the rule of judgment? Read Psal. i. and xv.; Matt. v. vii. and xxv.,

Oh! what a potent instrument for Satan is a misguided conscience(93)!