148 Inspiring Ethics Quotes

In a world where the lines between right and wrong can often seem blurred, guidance from wise words becomes invaluable. Ethics, the cornerstone of principled living, not only shapes our individual characters but also the society we inhabit. From philosophical reflections to modern-day interpretations, ethics continues to inspire and challenge us to strive for a more conscientious life. In curating the top 148 inspiring ethics quotes, this collection offers profound insights and timeless wisdom, reminding us of the importance of integrity, honesty, and moral reflection. Delve into these quotes to inspire your journey in making ethically sound decisions and fostering a life that resonates with virtue and purposeful action.

1. “Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.” - Thomas A. Edison

2. “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” - Elie Wiesel

3. “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.” - Albert Schweitzer

4. “Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.” - Albert Schweitzer

5. “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

6. “While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?” - George Bernard Shaw

7. “The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.” - Albert Schweitzer

8. “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” - Simone Weil

9. “You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?""It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize.""Must be a human thing.""Exactly.” - Christopher Moore

10. “A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.” - John Stuart Mill

11. “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.” - John Stuart Mill

12. “His moral lectureblazed with hate.What could have driven a child that far?” - Dag Hammarskjöld

13. “Ethics are so annoying. I avoid them on principle.” - Darby Conley

14. “The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.” - G.K. Chesterton

15. “It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.” - Erich Fromm

16. “Sustainability before ambition. Okal Rel.” - Lynda Williams

17. “Blood makes lousy detergent.” - Lynda Williams

18. “Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.” - Matthew Scully

19. “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.” - Aristotle

20. “Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I’m willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.” - Roberto Bolaño

21. “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” - Dalai Lama XIV

22. “Similarly with regard to truth, won't we say that a soul is maimed if it hates a voluntary falsehood, cannot endure to have one in itself, and is greatly angered when it exists in others, but is nonetheless content to accept an involuntary falsehood, isn't angry when it is caught being ignorant, and bears its lack of learning easily, wallowing in it like a pig?” - Plato

23. “But for this book we could not know right from wrong.” - Abraham Lincoln

24. “When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.” - Shirley Chisholm

25. “The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.” - Stanley Milgram

26. “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” - Aristotle

27. “The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.” - Mary Shelley

28. “I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .” - John Stuart Mill

29. “Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.” - Thomas Paine

30. “True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.” - David O. McKay

31. “The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.” - Adam Smith

32. “ethics is at the center of both spiritual practice and social transformation. Without a strong ethical foundation, we inevitably fall into contradictions-between means and ends, between our actions and our ideals." (p. 9)” - Donald Rothberg

33. “Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners.” - Geoffrey Miller

34. “What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.” - Sam Harris

35. “It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.” - Sam Harris

36. “What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.” - Sam Harris

37. “The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.” - Sam Harris

38. “If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.” - Sam Harris

39. “Ben Franklin said:"Early to bed and early to riseMake a man healthy wealthy and wise"Lately I have read the advice given to William Randolph Hearst, when a young man, by his father:"Go downtown at noon and rob the other fellows of what they have made during the morning.” - E. Haldeman-Julius

40. “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” - Graham Greene

41. “Ethics is a dream.” - Charles Baxter

42. “What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?” - Bernhard Schlink

43. “To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

44. “A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

45. “I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself” - Friedrich Nietzsche

46. “Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.” - Oscar Wilde

47. “What men do matters more than what they know.” - John Christopher

48. “I think that of all the principles for journalism, the most important is to complicate simple things and simplify complicated things. At first sight, you may think something is simple, but it may conceal a great deal. However, facing a very complex thing, you should find out its essence. -Jin Yongquan” - Judy Polumbaum

49. “It's frustrating to witness how popular Fairtrade bananas, coffee and tea have become with shoppers and supermarkets while plenty of unfair trade goes on, largely unnoticed, in our own back yard.” - Rose Prince

50. “Diese Haltung zur Opferung von Menschenleben ist seltsam. Militärbefehlshaber überlegen nicht zweimal, wenn sie Soldaten in die Schlacht schicken und dabei genau wissen, dass viele von ihnen sterben werden. [...] Andererseits verbietet es der Offiziersethos, einzelne Soldaten auszuwählen und ihnen zu befehlen, ihr Leben zu opfern [...]. Und doch - und das ist noch paradoxer - werden Soldaten, die eine solche Tat aus eigener Initiative vollbringen, als Helden betrachtet.” - J.M. Coetzee

51. “Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

52. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” - Milton Friedman

53. “An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.” - Jean Vanier

54. “Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!” - Steven Pinker

55. “I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error.” - Linus Pauling

56. “Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.” - Jeremy Bentham

57. “Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.” - Michael Pollan

58. “Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations about honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.)” - Peter Singer

59. “The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today. That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.” - Daniel Goleman

60. “One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

61. “By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were....Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.” - Erwin Schrödinger

62. “Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.” - Erwin Schrödinger

63. “We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.” - Christopher Hitchens

64. “The search for scapegoats is essentially an abnegation of responsibility: it indicates an inability to assess honestly and intelligently the true nature of the problems which lie at the root of social and economic difficulties and a lack of resolve in grappling with them.” - Aung San Suu Kyi

65. “A quiet conscience makes one strong!” - Anne Frank

66. “Ethics change with technology.” - Larry Niven

67. “About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.” - Christopher Hitchens

68. “Only those with a conscience can find an action unconscionable.” - F.D. Crandall

69. “Just take the weapon you hold in your hand and drive it through his heart," Valentine's voice was soft. "One simple motion. Nothing you haven't done before."Jace met his father's stare with a level gaze. "I saw Agramon," he said. "It had your face.""You saw Agramon?" The Soul-Sword glittered as Valentine moved toward his son. "And you lived?""I killed it.""You killed the Demon of Fear, but you won't kill a single vampire, not even at my order?"Jace stood watching Valentine without expression. "He's a vampire, that's true," he said. "But his name is Simon.” - Cassandra Clare

70. “At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.” - Paul Graham

71. “By 2030, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fish farming will dominate fish supplies. Given how wrong the FAO has been in the past--saying catches were going up when, in fact, they were going down--this statement is worth examining carefully. When you do, you find it to be an observation of previous trends, not a reflection of what could happen or what people might want--in the same way as Red Delicious was once far and away the most popular apple in the United States because it was basically the only apple you could get. The FAO is simply observing that fish farming is the fastest growing form of food production in the world--growing at 9 percent a year and by 12-13 percent in the United States. Nobody is asking us whether we want this. It is just happening. The continued destruction of mangrove swamps in poor countries to provide shrimp for people living in rich countries is simply the market operating in a vacuum untroubled by ethics. It is a reflection of what will go on happening if we do not find ways of exercising any choice in the matter.” - Charles Clover

72. “In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied--what used to be called an 'appetitive' person.” - Matthew Scully

73. “Most of us believe that eating meat is natural because humans have hunted and consumed animals for millennia. And it is true that we have been eating meat as part of an omnivorous diet for at least two million years (though for the majority of this time our diet was still primarily vegetarian). But to be fair, we must acknowledge that infanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are at least as old as meat eating, and are therefore arguably as 'natural'--and yet we don't invoke the history of these acts as justification for them. As with other acts of violence, when it comes to eating meat, we must differentiate between natural and justifiable.” - Melanie Joy

74. “We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different--cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness--but because our perception of them is different.” - Melanie Joy

75. “Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.” - David Gerrold

76. “I'm beginning to wonder," said Kent, sitting down now on an overturned wooden tub. "Who do I serve? Why am I here?"You are here, because, in the expanding ethical ambiguity of our situation, you are steadfast in your righteousness. It is to you, our banished friend, that we all turn—a light amid the dark dealings of family and politics. You are the moral backbone on which the rest of us hang our bloody bits. Without you we are merely wiggly masses of desire writhing in our own devious bile."Really?" asked the old knight.Aye," said I.I'm not sure I want to keep company with you lot, then.” - Christopher Moore

77. “The relation to the other is not epistemological, but ethical, and the whole attempt to accomodate or account for the other within the confines of my experience already constitutes a breach of this fundamental ethical relation. The other is precisely that which cannot be the object of my experience in the sense of being completely manifest within it, and so cannot be construed as a phenomenon at all.” - David R. Cerbone

78. “For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.” - Jessica Valenti

79. “Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.” - Richard Dawkins

80. “Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” - David Foster Wallace

81. “In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.” - Mahatma Gandhi

82. “And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.” - Jimmy Santiago Baca

83. “A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” - Albert Einstein

84. “It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.” - W. Somerset Maugham

85. “Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you’re due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings.” - Donald Van de Mark

86. “Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.” - Immanuel Kant

87. “It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed.""That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.” - Terry Pratchett

88. “Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.” - Tom Robbins

89. “Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.” - Marc Bekoff

90. “It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” - Karl Marx

91. “Make not, when you work a deed of shame, The scoundrel's plea, 'My forbears did the same.” - Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri

92. “He's bound to have done something,” Nobby repeated.In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.” - Terry Pratchett

93. “We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.” - Derrick Bell

94. “Immorality sanctified by tradition is still immorality.” - Bernard Rollin

95. “The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; but to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.” - Dr. Albert Schweitzer

96. “What other agents then are there, which, at the same time that they are under the influence of man's direction, are susceptible of happiness? They are of two sorts: (1) Other human beings who are styled persons. (2) Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things... But is there any reason why we should be suffered to torment them? Not any that I can see. Are there any why we should not be suffered to torment them? Yes, several. The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.” - Jeremy Bentham

97. “Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.” - Vaclav Havel

98. “Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions.” - Sigmund Freud

99. “Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.” - Sigmund Freud

100. “There’s such a thing as being irritatingly ethical,” said Eldric. “That’s you, right now.” That’s a pleasant change. Witches are rarely accused of being irritatingly ethical.“I’ve swigged.” I handed the bottle to Eldric. “Or is it swug?” “Swug,” said Eldric. “It is in bad-boy circles, at least.” He swug. “It tastes much better outside church.” “It’s the picnic principle,” I said. “Things taste better outdoors. And if it’s a forbidden thing, so much the better.” - Franny Billingsley

101. “The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life--knowing that under certain conditions it is not worth while to live. He is of a disposition to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done to him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination... He does not take part in public displays... He is open in his dislikes and preferences; he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things... He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave... He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries... He is not fond of talking... It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care... He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skillful general who marshals his limited forces with the strategy of war... He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.” - Aristotle

102. “To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.” - Peter Singer

103. “It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.” - Steven L. Peck

104. “There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

105. “There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action.” - Alasdair McIntyre

106. “The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.” - Jodi Picoult

107. “Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems.” - Charles Colson

108. “Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.” - Bernard Branson

109. “Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.” - Reinhold Niebuhr

110. “It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.” - Marcus Aurelius

111. “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.” - Baruch Spinoza

112. “Buddha wrote a code which he said would be useful to guide men in darkness, but he never claimed to be the Light of the world. Buddhism was born with a disgust for the world, when a prince's son deserted his wife and child, turning from the pleasures of existence to the problems of existence. Burnt by the fires of the world, and already weary with it, Buddha turned to ethics.” - Fulton J. Sheen

113. “Our Blessed Lord left the world without leaving any written message. His doctrine was Himself. Ideal and History were identified in Him. The truth that all other ethical teachers proclaimed, and the light that they gave to the world, was not IN them, but OUTSIDE them. Our Divine Lord, however, identified Divine Wisdom with Himself. It was the first time in history that it was ever done, and it has never been done since.” - Fulton J. Sheen

114. “Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I’ve done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn’t hear them calling my name.” - Curtis Sittenfeld

115. “What interests me, personally, is work which in some way, speaks the truth to power…I don’t think we speak the truth to power for power’s ear, but for the ear and the imagination of future generations, who would seek to live in a world free from the malign and self-serving influence of those who wield it.” - Irvine Welsh

116. “Each of us lives with a sword over his head.There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.” - Murray Kempton

117. “... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.” - Dan Simmons

118. “I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food systems have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord.” - Brian Awehali

119. “Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.” - K.W. Jeter

120. “إن التقدم العلمي مهما كان واضحاً بارزاً، لا يمكنه أن يجعل الأخلاق والدين غير ضروريين.فالعلم لا يعلم الناس كيف يحيون، ولا من شأنه أن يقدم لنا معايير قيمية. ذلك لأن القيم التي تسمو بالحياة الحيوانية إلى مستوى الحياة الإنسانية تبقى مجهولة وغير مفهومة بدون الدين. فالدين مدخل إلى عالم أخر متفوق على هذا العالم، والأخلاق هي معناه.” - علي عزت بيجوفيتش

121. “Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.” - David Foster Wallace

122. “And what we say - that what He willeth is right and what He doth not not will is wrong, is not so to be understood, as if, should God will something inconsistent, it would be right because He willed it. For it does not follow that if God would lie it would be right to lie, but rather that he were not God.” - St. Anselm of Canterbury

123. “Deplorable practices adopted during the last century were repeatedly declared necessary if regrettable in order to win the war. Oddly enough, we've yet to win. You'd think somebody would have asked before this why the regrettable but necessary measures haven't actually produced the promised results.” - Jack Campbell

124. “Principles are what people have instead of God.To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbour's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them.'Principle' is an even duller word than 'Religion'.” - Frederick Buechner

125. “It is very wrong to kill any one[.]""Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!” - Oscar Wilde

126. “Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality.” - George MacDonald

127. “A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.” - G.K. Chesterton

128. “Men with power had the responsibility to know what was best, and they so rarely did.” - Beck Sherman

129. “Une éthique véritablement socialiste, c'est-à-dire qui cherche la justice sans supprimer la liberté, qui impose aux individus des charges mais sans abolir l'individualité, se trouvera fort embarrassée par les problèmes que pose la condition de la femme.” - Simone de Beauvoir

130. “Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society” - Bertrand Russell

131. “We've also evolved the ability to simply 'pay it forward': I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. 'When I am older,' said the boy to his father, 'I will carry you across this river as you now do for me.' 'No, you won't,' said the father stoically. 'When you are older you will have your own concerns. All I expect is that one day you will carry your own son across this river as I no do for you.' Cultivating this attitude is an important part of Humanism--to realize that life without God can be much more than a series of strict tit-for-tat transactions where you pay me and I pay you back. Learning to pay it forward can add a tremendous sense of meaning and dignity to our lives. Simply put, it feels good to give to others, whether we get back or not.” - Greg Epstein

132. “A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

133. “Due to some dim but irresistible notion of the way things are, it is simply not possible, out of order, not apprpriate to the situation at hand, if, within the circle of those who are experienced and advanced in years, the young person declaims ethical generalities. Young people will again and again find themselves in a situation that is so irritating, astounding, and incomprehensible to them that their word falls on deaf ears, while the word of an older person is heard and has weight even though its content is no different at all. It will be a sign of maturity or immaturity whether this experience leads them to understand that what is at stake here is not the stubborn self-satisfaction of old age, or the anxious effort to keep youth in their place, but the pereservation or violation of an essential ethical law. Ethical discourse needs authorization, which youth are simply not able to bestow upon themselves, even if they speak out of the purest pathos of their ethical conviction. Ethical discourse does not merely depend on the correct content of what is said, but also on the speaker being authorized to say it. Its validity depends not only on what is said, but also on who says it.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

134. “Without ethics, science would be cruelty.” - Nenia Campbell

135. “Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.” - Fulton J. Sheen

136. “لقد حدد رسول الإسلام الغاية الأولى من بعثته، والمنهاج المبين في دعوته بقوله إنما بعثت لأتمم مكارم الأخلاق” - محمد الغزالي

137. “ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas.” - Martin Cohen

138. “There are already plenty of people who will take a firm stand on the need to be competely impartial between right and wrong.” - Martin Cohen

139. “A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.” - Fulton J. Sheen

140. “Not everyone can be bribed with meat, Oberon." "They Can't? Oh! you mean they're vegetarian.""No, they eat meat. It just doesn't sway their decision making process." "Well that... that's just wrong, Atticus!Are they Monsters? It's like they have no moral center!” - Kevin Hearne

141. “Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.” - Immanuel Kant

142. “My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

143. “Would you agree," he said, "that man's sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible?""Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain." My father crossed his arms. "And only if one man's pleasure is as important as any other's.” - Susan Hubbard

144. “Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy.” - Darrell Drake

145. “We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.” - Jonathan Sacks

146. “So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.” - Bertrand Russell

147. “If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?” - K.L. Toth

148. “One can reach the gates of hell just as easily by short steps as by large.” - Douglas Preston