Ethical Quotes

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action. (Jerry Pournelle)
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. View quote
William James
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly. View quote
Margaret Mead
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons. View quote
Mary McCarthy
I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit. View quote
Felix Adler
Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows--it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces. View quote
José Rizal
The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D. C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history. View quote
Nancy Pelosi
The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man - whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them. View quote
Jane Goodall
The ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them. You haven't seen any biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates. View quote
Ray Kurzweil
The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior. (Earl Warren)
Ethical axioms are founded and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience. View quote
Albert Einstein
To date, embryonic stem cell research has not produced a single medical treatment, where ethical, adult stem cell research has produced some 67 medical miracles. View quote
Mike Pence
Moses is the keystone to every man's ethical code. He was the first man of record in history to conceive of the law as separate from the will of a ruler, to choose whether a man should live by grace of law, or law by grace of man. In a literal sense Moses lives at every council table today. View quote
Charlton Heston
Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that contains moral, ethical, and legal truisms that any person of any religion or even an atheist can recognize and appreciate. View quote
Cliff Stearns
I think my uncle was probably the biggest influence in my life. We grew up in the same house, and he was just a really great, hard-working, honest, ethical person. View quote
Catherine Bell
If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing. View quote
Henry Kravis
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public. View quote
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
A country should be defended not by arms, but by ethical behavior. View quote
Vinoba Bhave
Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit. View quote
Freda Adler
To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged. (W. H. Auden)
It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. [...] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. [...] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions-for these are our issues, not nature's. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements. View quote
Peter Singer