Quotes about Ethics
Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.
- Harry S. Truman
A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.
- Henry David Thoreau
There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.
- Henry David Thoreau
If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.
- Henry David Thoreau
It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.
- Henry David Thoreau
What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.
- Henry David Thoreau
When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.
- Henry David Thoreau
To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
- Henry David Thoreau
Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.
- Henry David Thoreau
If man looks within himself he must perceive two things: a law of right, and that which it condemns.
- Henry Parry Liddon