Ethics Quotes - Page 18

• It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," What Are People For?, 1989 Jesus pioneered a relationship ethic based on compassion. Being a disciple means building relationships - with the Creator and with all creation and creatures.

  Leonard Sweet

  Jesus, Mean, Animal

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• Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar.

  David Shi

  Beautiful, Self, Essence

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• Ethical and moral questions and how we answer them may determine whether primal scenes will continue to be a source of joy and comfort to future generations. The decisions are ours and we have to search our minds and souls for the right answers... We must be eternally vigilant, embrace the broad concept of an environmental ethic to survive.

  Sigurd F. Olson

  Future, Decision, Joy

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• The recognition of the sanctity of the life of every man is the first and only basis of all morality.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Men, Firsts, Recognition

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• We endeavor to make a virtue of the faults we are unwilling to correct.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Faults, Virtue, Endeavor

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• Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Art, Eye, Judging

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• In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Attitude, Tragedy, World

  Albert Schweitzer (1949). “Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography”, New York : H. Holt

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• In April, I asked my staff to determine if Senate rules and relevant laws would allow me to direct the trustees to sell any remaining HCA stock. In May, my staff worked with outside counsel and with the Senate ethics committee staff to draft a written communication to the trustees. After obtaining pre-approval by mid-June from the Senate ethics committee, I issued a letter directing my trustees to sell any remaining HCA stock in my family's trust.

  Bill Frist

  Communication, Law, June

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• Since when do grown men and women, who presume to hold high government office and exercise what they think of as "moral leadership," require ethics officers to tell them whether it is or isn't permissible to grab the secretary's behind or redirect public funds to their own personal advantage?

  Meg Greenfield

  Success, Exercise, Men

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• The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts 'sins' and others 'virtue' on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.

  Bertrand Russell

  Christian, Class, Labels

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “Education and the Social Order”, p.73, Routledge

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• Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life - all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.

  Henry Beston

  Nature, House, Balance

  Henry Beston (1956). “The Outermost House”

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• I don't want to know anything about your system of ethics. Strength is the morality of the man who stands out from the rest, and it is mine.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Men, Want, Morality

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• Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night.

  Horace Greeley

  Mean, Cutting, Winter

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• Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

  Ingmar Bergman

  Art, Attitude, Political

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• Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

  Daniel Dennett

  Thinking, Psychology, Religion

  Daniel C. Dennett (2014). “Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life”, p.63, Simon and Schuster

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• I dream of big things. I work for the small things. If you're going to dream, you might as well dream big. A lot of that came from my mother. She was adamant about the work ethic---about how you can't just dream things.

  Kevin Costner

  Mother, Dream, Work Ethic

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• I take no pleasure in seeing DeLay swing gently in the wind. But the thing I believe in the most is ethics. If someone has lost his moral compass and has to go to jail to find it, then I believe it will make him a much better person.

  Tom DeLay

  Believe, Compassion, Wind

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• The goal changes from the general to the individual from need to wish, from ethics to aesthetics.

  Asger Jorn

  Goal, Wish, Needs

  Asger Jorn, Per Hovdenakk, Stine Høholt, Arken museum for moderne kunst (Ishøj, Denmark), Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Amstelveen, Netherlands) (2002). “Asger Jorn”

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• What is the nature of true morality? I have argued ... that it must be a kind of ethics involving letting go of one's own interest on behalf of others, being ready if necessary to sacrifice one's own interests for them, even on behalf of an enemy.

  George F. R. Ellis

  Letting Go, Sacrifice, Enemy

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• The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.

  John Scott

  Artist, Innocence And Experience, Architect

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• A lot of fishermen are telling us they like things the way they are. They aren't pushing for the change. It's part of the conservation ethic that coastal fishermen have developed.

  Larry J. McKinney

  Way, Pushing, Conservation

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• The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

  Matthew Arnold

  Religious, Religion, Morality

  'Literature and Dogma' (1873) ch. 1

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• Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible.

  Mark Hopkins

  Superstitions, Morality, Impossible

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• I'd rather be right than President.

  Henry Clay

  Inspirational, Ironic, President

  Quoted in Niles' Register, 23 Mar. 1839

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• Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were only made for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered or enslaved.

  John Muir

  Teaching, School, Mean

  John Muir (1997). “Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays”, p.56, Library of America

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