Quotes about Ethics

your character is the sum total of your habits. You can't claim to be kind unless you are habitually kind — you show kindness without even thinking about it. You can't claim to have integrity unless it is your habit to always be honest.

The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn't that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live. What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

When we hear people saying they can't believe in a God who gets angry—yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard the food supply? What kind of God wouldn't get angry at a financial scheme that robs thousands of people of their life savings?

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

If the ethical - that is, social morality - is the highest and if there is in a person no residual incommensurability in some way such that this incommensurability is not evil then no categories are needed other than what Greek philosophy had... and what their wisdom amounts to is the beautiful proposition that basically everything is the same.

It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable.

I didn't think about its being wrong to go in and try on the brooch; but I see now that it was and I'll never do it again. That's one good thing about me. I never do the same naughty thing twice

We do not benefit from a relationship with China or any other country in which we put our values and our ideals aside.

Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.

Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.