It is curious – curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

MARK TWAIN

Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Conventionality is not morality.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

MARCUS AURELIUS

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

ALBERT CAMUS

Nothing is less important than which fork you use.  Etiquette is the science of living.  It embraces everything.  It is ethics.  It is honor.

EMILY POST

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad.  That’s my religion.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

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 ALVA EDISON

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

ISAAC ASIMOV

The main object of conciliation lies in reaching a solution to a case based upon morals and with a warm heart.

CONFUCIUS

Consider the following.  We humans are social beings.  We come into the world as the result of others’ actions.  We survive here in dependence on others.  Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities.  For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

Nor is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by concern for others. But that is not all.  We find that not only do altruistic actions bring about happiness but they also lessen our experience of suffering.  Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others’ happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune than the one who does not.  Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all.  But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace, anxiety, doubt, disappointment these things are definitely less.  In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense.

What does this tell us?  Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others’ happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others.  Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others’ happiness.

HIS HOLINESS THE 14TH DALAI LAMA IN ETHICS FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM

The good ended happily and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means.

OSCAR WILDE IN THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

PLATO

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others.  In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

IMMANUEL KANT

Theft, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all had a place among virtuous actions.  Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

BLAISE PASCAL

No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly.

 JUVENAL

If there are going to be people out there making war on other people, don’t you think it’s a good idea for some of those people to at least follow a code of ethics?  Not ‘honor’ but something you can pin down and be sure of, something with the same rules for everybody.

 MERCEDES LACKEY

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

 DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to discover it himself.

 GALILEO

In his own way each man must struggle, lest the normal law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.

JANE ADDAMS

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

JANE ADDAMS

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

JANE ADDAMS

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

JANE ADDAMS

Let me give you the definition of ethics: it is good to maintain life and to further life. It is bad to damage and destroy life. And this ethic, profound and universal, has the significance of a religion. It is religion.

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.

BUDDHA

A Humanist Code of Ethics:

Do no harm to the earth, she is your mother.
Being is more important than having.
Never promote yourself at another’s expense.
Hold life sacred; treat it with reverence.
Allow each person the dignity of his or her labor.
Open your home to the wayfarer.
Be ready to receive your deepest dreams;
sometimes they are the speech of unblighted conscience.
Always make restitutions to the ones you have harmed.
Never think less of yourself than you are.
Never think that you are more than another.

ARTHUR DOBRIN

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

DENIS DIDEROT

The cosmos is neither moral nor immoral; only people are. He who would move the world must first move himself.

EDWARD ERICSON

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one’s own, is ever the beginning of one’s real ethical development.

FELIX ADLER

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

H. L. MENCKEN

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

HIEROCLES

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.

JOHN WESLEY

Always do right–this will gratify some and astonish the rest.

MARK TWAIN

The Roots of Violence:

Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles.

MOHANDAS GANDHI

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

OMAR N. BRADLEY

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

ORIGEN

The highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

T. S. ELIOT IN MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.

THOMAS ERSKINE

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

THOMAS PAINE

Ethics thought out is religious thought; ethics felt out is religious feeling, and ethics lived out is the religious life.

WILLIAM CHANNING GANNETT