Ethical Quotes - Page 12

• The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

  David Bowie

  Technology, Progress, May

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• My Dad is my hero. He's 85 now and he is in great health. He is handsome and strong. He has an incredible moral and ethical backbone. I couldn't have been luckier with my parents.

  Harry Connick, Jr.

  Strong, Dad, Hero

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• The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.

  Freeman Dyson

  Technology, People, Problem

  Freeman Dyson (1999). “Imagined World”, p.182, Universities Press

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• Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.

  Roger Ebert

  Challenges, Tragedy, Needs

  Roger Ebert (2016). “The Great Movies IV”, p.90, University of Chicago Press

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• The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.

  Roger Ebert

  Character, Hollywood, Film

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• I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.

  Michael J. Fox

  Believe, Humility, Practice

  "Happy Birthday, Michael". Interview with Rosemary Ellis, www.goodhousekeeping.com. May 5, 2011.

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• There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. This would nevertheless require a courageous change of attitude on the part of political leaders.

  Pope Francis

  Attitude, Leader, Political

  Pope Francis (2016). “Care for Creation: A Call for Ecological Conversion”, p.36, Orbis Books

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• Where defining foreign policy as 'ethical' went wrong was that it implied that all decisions would be exclusive in every respect of any dealings with unethical regimes.

  William Hague

  Decision, Would Be, Defining

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• Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Believe, Awards, Eyebrows

  "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. April 25, 2007.

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• Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Animal, Men, Skills

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.96, Penguin

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• The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

  Susan Sontag

  Ethical Issues, Mass Culture, Minorities

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• Ethical veganism results in a profound revolution within the individual; a complete rejection of the paradigm of oppression and violence that she has been taught from childhood to accept as the natural order. It changes her life and the lives of those with whom she shares this vision of nonviolence. Ethical veganism is anything but passive; on the contrary, it is the active refusal to cooperate with injustice

  Gary L. Francione

  Order, Profound, Rejection

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• Ethical veganism represents a commitment to nonviolence.

  Gary L. Francione

  Commitment, Classism, Speciesism

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• You're more than Dauntless," he says in a low voice. "But if you want to be just like them, hurling yourself into ridiculous situations for no reason and retaliating against your enemies without any regard for what's ethical, go right ahead. I thought you were better than that, but maybe I was wrong.

  Veronica Roth

  Voice, Enemy, Want

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• The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

  Russell Kirk

  Religious, Character, Order

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.472, Regnery Publishing

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• This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Strong, Crazy, Animal

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• "I signed on for the role of ‘boyfriend,’ not ‘conscience.’ If you want wholesome and ethical, you’ll have to look elsewhere. But I promise that won’t be half as much fun as this is…" His hand slid down my side and over my hip, and my heart beat faster.

  Rachel Vincent

  Fun, Heart, Hands

  "Before I Wake". Book by Rachel Vincent, 2011.

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• My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Lying, Growing, May

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.1764, Random House

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• But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Selfish, Reality, Firsts

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.236, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

  Charles Stross

  Thinking, Ethical Standards, Agony

  Charles Stross (2010). “The Fuller Memorandum”, p.113, Penguin

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• It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

  Terence McKenna

  Simple

  "Appreciating Imagination". Podcast from the Psychedelic Salon number 203, Part 3, matrixmasters.net. 1997.

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• Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

  Oscar Wilde

  Mistake, Character, Past

  Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Penny Dreadfuls: Tales of Horror: Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.719, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.

  Lee Child

  Dog, Men, People

  Lee Child (2006). “Die Trying: A Jack Reacher Novel”, p.215, Penguin

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• In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.

  Timothy Leary

  Communication, Creativity, Successful

  Timothy Leary (2010). “The Politics of Self-Determination”, p.74, Ronin Publishing

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• unless the direction of science is guided by a consciously ethical motivation, especially compassion, its effects may fail to bring benefit. They may indeed cause great harm.

  Dalai Lama

  Motivation, Compassion, Benefits

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