Quotes about Ethics

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.

Be good and you will be lonely.

If you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.

Resolved, never to suffer the least motions of anger to irrational beings.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it?

The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well--to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how--and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly — an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a 'practical' point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

We live by the assumption that what's good for us is good for the world. And this is based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what's good for us.