Quotes about Ethics

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.

You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do—merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.

I could not attempt to 'kindle the younger generation with the Gospel,' the most I could do would be to suggest to them that the Christian Faith is a logical explanation of the Universe well worth their attention, and neither an irrational myth nor a system of ethics which will stand by itself when the dogmatic foundation has been removed from beneath it.

As the Head of a woman's college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word 'compromise' had been omitted from her vocabulary; and all statesmanship is compromise.

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

They knew, with the painful conviction of experience, what it meant to say, "I see and approve the better, but follow the worse.

The possibility of evil exists from the moment that a creature is made that can love and do good because it chooses and not because it is unable to do anything else. The actuality of evil exists from the moment that that choice is exercised in the wrong direction.

The safeguards of virtue are hateful to the evil disposed.

If you choose bad companions, no one will believe that you are anything but bad yourself.