ethics Quotes

“A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.”

“Have you forgotten, then, the words with which your Ethics treats of those three dispositions that strike at Heaven’s will: incontinence and malice and mad bestiality?”

“If you knew the trouble we’ve had because Howl will keep falling in love like this! We’ve had lawsuits, and suitors with swords, and mothers with rolling pins, and fathers and uncles with cudgels. And aunts. Aunts are terrible. They go for you with hat pins. But the worst is when the girl herself finds out where Howl lives and turns up at the door, crying and miserable. Howl goes out through the back door and Calcifer and I have to deal with them all.”

“If the whole profession is doing it, how can you call it ‘unprofessional conduct’?”

“Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn’t donate nothing. They took them and didn’t ask...What really would upset Henrietta is the fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything—we didn’t know nothing about those cells and he didn’t care.”

“Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.”

“The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night—because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.‘”

“I’m actually educated to think that morals and ethics do not necessarily go hand in hand.”

″‘Well, I was with [Caspian] on that journey: with him and Reepicheep the Mouse, and the Lord Drinian and all of them […] and what I want to say is this, that I’m the King’s man; and if this parliament of owls is any sort of plot against the King, I’m having nothing to do with it.‘”

“I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on. Bless my soul, you’ll be telling me next that I ought to have asked the guinea-pigs’ permission before I used them! No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.”

“Lieutenant Kaffee, I believe in God, and in His son, Jesus Christ. And because I do, I can say this: Private Santiago isn’t dead because of a Code Red. He’s dead because he had no honor. He’s dead because he had no Code. And God was watching.”

“We didn’t join the Corps ‘cause we felt like it, we joined ‘cause it was a life decision. We wanted to live by a code, sir. And we found it in the Corps. And now you’re asking me to sign a piece of paper that says we have no honor. We have no Code. You’re asking us to say we’re not Marines.”

″‘Your Majesty’s tender years,’ said Gumpas, with what was meant to be a fatherly smile, ‘hardly make it possible that you should understand the economic problem involved. I have statistics, I have graphs, I have – ’ ‘Tender as my years may be,’ said Caspian, ‘I believe I understand the slave trade from within quite as well as your Sufficiency. And I do not see that it brings into the islands meat or bread or beer or wine or timber or cabbages or books or instruments of music or horses or armour or anything else worth having. But whether it does or not, it must be stopped.’ ‘But that would be putting the clock back,’ gasped the Governor. ‘Have you no idea of progress, of development?’ ‘I have seen them both in an egg,’ said Caspian. ‘We call it Going bad in Narnia. This trade must stop.‘”

“‘Ride with an outlaw, die with him,’ [Gus] added. ‘I admit it’s a harsh code. But you rode on the other side long enough to know how it works. I’m sorry you crossed the line, though.‘”

“Ethical studies may fairly be called political; and for this reason rhetoric masquerades as political science, and the professors of it as political experts-sometimes from want of education, sometimes from ostentation, sometimes owing to other human failings.”

“Very hard ethical questions are involved,” he went on. “You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace. I hope you take all that in. I hope you are absolutely clear in your own mind about that.”

“What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions…”

“Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary… if I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby, to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.”

“Up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it.”

“Nippers…was a whiskered, sallow, and upon the whole rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers – ambition and indigestion.”

“It is not seldom the case that, when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind.”

“I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.”

“Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle – a great safeguard to its possessor.”

″‘They do it all the time,’ says Hayden. ‘That’s what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.‘”

“I have saddled myself with the burdens of innocent people rotting away in prison while rapists and murderers roam free.”

“As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.”