Ethical Quotes - Page 16

• I find that the interesting challenges, because there's obvious things where, you know, don't be unethical, don't be evil, you know, don't break the law, don't do immoral things, those are all straightforward and don't create ethical dilemmas. The thing that's interesting is when you actually have multiple interests at stake and you have to kind of navigate your way through it.

  Reid Hoffman

  Law, Obvious Things, Evil

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Church, the spiritual power, and the executive power are working today united in a system that confronts people. This alliance or cooperation between the spiritual power and the executive power, between the church and the government, unfortunately takes away the Church's basic mission. It takes away their right to speak on moral or ethical subjects.

  Andrey Zvyagintsev

  Spiritual, Government, People

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I think the ethical standards established in this White House have been the highest in the history of the White House.

  Al Gore

  Thinking, Ethical Standards, White

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• There was a time, before I was in graduate school, when political philosophy pretty much ceased to exist. The positivists thought there were only two things you could do: conceptual analysis or empirical investigation. Any kind of political theory or even ethical theory was nonsense.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Philosophy, School, Two

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• [There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Men, Vices, Groups

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• Teaching is almost like an act of prayer for me. I feel that I am present at the intersection of people and ideas in a very holy way. There are not many places where successful adults can take a break from work or domestic issues and freely and safely explore their inner lives or global issues through an ethical lens.

  Erica Brown

  Prayer, Teaching, Successful

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I've actually spent about half of my life overseas in the third world. I grew up in Tanzania, East Africa, and later lived in South-West Asia. In general, everywhere I go, I am treated with great respect and hospitality, but I need to be sensitive to cultural, tribal and ethical customs of the local people. In this modern era of technology, I think we forget that the most important thing when traveling is to listen and learn, and establish relationship, and not be hidden behind technology like Goretex, emails, satellite phones, and insulated from the people around you.

  Greg Mortenson

  Thinking, Technology, People

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• I want to yell about it most days and stop strangers in the street to share my outrage. But my mind is too serpentine to offer instant poem reactions. I can however stand back and examine the deeper ground, or at least that's what I hope my poems are doing. I believe contemplation can be an ethical act and literature can be a profound agent of cultural change, so I hope in some way my poems expand the conversations about environmental decline and social responsibility.

  Robin Beth Schaer

  Believe, Responsibility, Profound

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There have been a number of philosophers who have reveled in the dismantling of truth. I think they did so with good ethical motives, and for good philosophical reasons. I can see the sense in what they were talking about; the idea that truth is often claimed by elites in order to further certain agendas. They crowd-out alternative perspectives - particularly those of the powerless. But the undermining of truth contributed - in the weird, indirect way that philosophy contributes to the culture - to a rejection of the idea of truth as having any kind of proper meaning at all.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.

  Sam Harris

  War, People, May

  "In Defense of Torture" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 17, 2005.

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• Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could not be more distinct For Chomsky, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

  Sam Harris

  Children, Differences, Parent

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• I think it's really easy for people to point out hypocrisy in people's lives. It's like yeah, I get on planes a lot, and I drank from a plastic water bottle today - you know what I'm saying? A lot of people would just be like, "Oh, you're a hypocrite. You live in an ecovillage for a month, and then you fly around the world to talk about a movie." Don't think that I don't think about those things! Don't think that that's not, like, a quandary in my life. It can be a pretty intense ethical dilemma. I think it's about figuring out, you know, navigating life.

  Ellen Page

  Hypocrite, Thinking, Hypocrisy

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• Instead of a bottom-line based on money and power, we need a new bottom-line that defines productivity and creativity as where corporations, governments, schools, public institutions, and social practices are judged as efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent they maximize money and power, but to the extent they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and our capacities to respond with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

  Michael Lerner

  Creativity, School, Caring

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• Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing.

  Michael Lerner

  Spiritual, Hurt, Believe

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• I really don't know why people have so much trouble now writing about religious faith. It is true that clichés can override more interesting impulses. But the desire to find meaning, to be generous, to live well in an ethical and spiritual sense, is so widespread that it should not seem alien to people when it is expressed in the terms of traditional religion.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Spiritual, Religious, Writing

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• The ethical manifold, conceived of as unified, furnishes, or rather is, the ideal of the whole.

  Felix Adler

  Manifold, Ideals, Whole

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• The Ethical Society, therefore, is like a Church in maintaining, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining the custom of public assemblies on Sunday.

  Felix Adler

  Sunday, Church, Maintaining

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• Most of the ethical dilemmas that I have faced have all been in the category of, you know, I know something and what's my obligation to disclose it. So, for example, you see people make a mistake in the contract that you're making between the businesses and do you disclose it or do you reveal it? And generally speaking, the way that I solve these is I kind of go through a list of, you know, what's the most, what are the obligations and constituencies and in what order?

  Reid Hoffman

  Mistake, Order, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Are there experts, ethical experts, that's very offensive to all of us? Because it's part of our humanity to have a stake in these questions to feel that we ourselves know the difference between right and wrong. And then along come these experts, philosophers, claiming, you know, an expertise, a special training, a special skill, a special talent.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Skills, Differences, Humanity

  "What Do We Have To Teach Plato?". "Here and Now" with Robin Young, kbia.org. April 22, 2014.

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• When a doctor refuses money, even the most ethical ones, you usually start driving a good bargain with the undertaker.

  Sue Sanders

  Doctors, Greed, Dying

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• My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, butintellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.

  W.N.P. Barbellion

  Self, Interesting, Diaries

  W.N.P. Barbellion (2017). “The Journal of a Disappointed Man: & A Last Diary”, p.363, Courier Dover Publications

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• First, perseverance trumps talent. Second, do what you want to do, otherwise why bother? Third, be ethical; it might rub off on others. Fourth, don't give up.

  Jay Maisel

  Perseverance, Giving Up, Don't Give Up

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• Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Spiritual, Thinking, Self

  "Philosophy of Civilisation". Book by Albert Schweitzer, Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics, Preface, 1949.

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• The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Truth, Law

  Henry David Thoreau (1862). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By Henry D. Thoreau”, p.381

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• All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Truth, Expression, Doe

  Henry David Thoreau (2007). “My Thoughts Are Murder to the State: Thoreau's Essays on Political Philosophy”, p.133, David M Gross

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