Ethics Quotes

It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.

A satyagrahi is sometimes bound to use language which is capable of two meanings, provided both the meanings are obvious and necessary and there is no intention to deceive anyone.

I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done

You negotiate in bad faith if you do not forgive your adversary.

If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.

The bite of conscience is indecent.

In art the end does not sanctify the means: but sacred means employed here can sanctify the end.

Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man's character.

We are all victims of the violence that animals suffer... their liberation is also our liberation.

We should practice by showing one another love and helping one another. It is a mistake to pursue happiness and to seek to the avoid suffering by deceiving and humiliating other people. We must try to achieve happiness and eliminate suffering by being good-hearted and well-behaved.

In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

It is as much our obligation not to cooperate with evil as it is to cooperate with good

My view is that we stand up for treating the animals in a considerate way, for completely renouncing the eating of meat and also for speaking out against it. This is what I do myself. And in this way many a one becomes aware of a problem that was put forward so late.

Money was established for exchange, but interest causes it to be reproduced by itself. Therefore this way of earning money is greatly in conflict with the natural law.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

Those who experiment on animals should never be able to quiet their own conscience by telling themselves that these cruelties have a worthy aim.

Every Man owes some of his time to the upbuilding of the profession to which he belongs.

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting

In cases of this sort, let us say adultery, rightness and wrongness do not depend on committing it with the right woman at the right time and in the right manner, but the mere fact of committing such action at all is to do wrong.

Truth and nonviolence demand that no human being may debar himself from serving any other human being, no matter how sinful he may be.

Cowards can never be moral.

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.

The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.

. . . as to moral feeling, this supposed special sense, the appeal to it is indeed superficial when those who cannot think believe that feeling will help them out, even in what concerns general laws: and besides, feelings which naturally differ infinitely in degree cannot furnish a uniform standard of good and evil, nor has any one a right to form judgments for others by his own feelings. . . .

Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic

Do unto others as you wish others do unto you.

I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.

Honor is a harder master than the law.

I've been very careful about what I say yes to and what I say no to. And I think seriously always about... this may be a good idea right now or it may be a lot of money right now, but will it be good for me five years from now? Will it be fun? Will it make me hate myself? I think about all of those things.

I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a 'matter-of-fact' habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity.

To joy in conquest is to joy in the loss of human life.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is wrong. There is no other time.

The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done.

Ethics evolve naturally, and we trample upon them with laws created by reason and experience.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States struck back. She didn't go and bomb - she bombed any part of Japan. She dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Those people in Hiroshima probably hadn't even, some of them; most of them hadn't even killed anybody.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

Moral science is better occupied when treating of friendship than of justice.

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

Loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

A free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.

Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.

The beast in us must be[78] wheedled: ethic is necessary, that we may not be torn to pieces.

Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

If you believe that all men are created equal, then a child's death in some other country is no less tragic than in the United States.

Cows scream louder than carrots.

The most unequivocal sign of contempt for man is to regard everybody merely as a means to one's own ends, or of no account whatever.

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular.

The essence of true religious teaching is that one should serve and befriend all.

Ethics: The indispensable interface between my desire to be happy and yours.