Ethical Quotes - Page 8

• If I do eat meat, it's got to be ethical. I want to know that it lived a great life before it was killed humanely.

  Ricky Gervais

  Meat, Want, Knows

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• The Bible contains legendary, historical, and ethical contents. It is quite possible to consider them separately, and one doesn't have to accept the legends in order to get the ethics. Fundamentalists make a grave mistake to insist on the letter of the writings, because they drive away many who can't swallow the Adam-and-Eve bit.

  Isaac Asimov

  Mistake, Writing, Order

  Isaac Asimov (1995). “Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters”, Doubleday Books

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• But we must not forget, this ritual expressed, certain ideas which lie at the very root of true religion, the fellowship of the worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity, and the consecration of the bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical relations between man and man.

  William Robertson Smith

  Religious, Lying, Men

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• We need to reject not only outdated fossil-fuel technology, but also an outdated economic system and an outdated corporatist political system. The progressive view is that we are smart enough and ethical enough to not have to be subservient to corporations. We can create our own resilient, localized communities.

  Tim DeChristopher

  Smart, Technology, Views

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society - one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security.

  Michael Lerner

  Spiritual, Caring, Principles

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• We are opposed to all cruelty, so as advocates of non-violence, opponents of oppression, people who abhor the cruelty inherent in slaughtering we say the only ethical way to consume flesh is to pick up the carcass of an animal who has died naturally or been killed accidentally, say by being hit by a car, and eat that.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Animal, Car, People

  India Together, July 2000.

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• Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Voice, People

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• Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision-making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question, for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society.

  Jimmy Reid

  Essence, Government, People

  "Still irresistible, a working-class hero's finest speech". www.independent.co.uk. August 12, 2010.

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• Without doubt half the ethical rules they din into our ears are designed to keep us at work.

  Llewelyn Powys

  Doubt, Ears, Half

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• He [Jesus] was the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I've ever encountered in my life or in my reading. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world.

  Charles Templeton

  Jesus, Reading, Commitment

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• The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy.

  Paul Hawken

  Philosophy, Creative, Promise

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• Man is unique in that he has plans, purpose and goals which require the need for criteria of choice. The need for ethical value is within man whose future may largely be determined by the choice he make

  George Bernard Shaw

  Unique, Men, Goal

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• Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights

  Nathaniel Branden

  Thinking, Rights, Judging

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• I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives. A disastrous by-product of the development of the scientific and technical mentality. We are guilty. Man grows cold faster than the planet he inhabits.

  Albert Einstein

  Sad, Believe, Men

  letter to Dr. Otto Fullisburger, cited in: Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, p. 75, 2004.

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• The most ethical administration in the history of the Republic.

  William J. Clinton

  Stupid, Humorous, Republic

  "Hillary Clinton stares down her enemies". www.cnn.com.

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• Most corporate mission statements are worthless. They consist largely of pious platitudes such as: "We will hold ourselves to the highest standards of professionalism and ethical behavior." They often formulate necessities as objectives; for example, "to achieve sufficient profit." This is like a person saying his mission is to breathe sufficiently.

  Russell L. Ackoff

  Risk, Example, Management

  Russell L. Ackoff (1986). “Management in Small Doses”, Wiley

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• By ethical argument and moral principle the greatest crimes are eventually shown to have been necessary, and, in fact, a signal benefit to mankind.

  Zhuangzi

  Taoism, Principles, Benefits

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• The Christian's life in all its aspects-intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness-is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it. So apart from him, not only will there be no lively believers and no lively congregations, there will be no believers and no congregations at all.

  J. I. Packer

  Christian, Intellectual, Spirit

  J. I. Packer (2005). “Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God”, p.15, Baker Books

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• In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Religious, Teaching

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and deceit. They have brought many unfortunate people into a state of poverty, especially the farmers, working class people and the very poor. Then as now Jews have to be reminded intermittently anew that they were enjoying rights in any country since they left Palestine and the Arabian desert, and subsequently their ethical and moral doctrines as well as their deeds rightly deserve to be exposed to criticism in whatever country they happen to live.

  Pope Clement VIII

  Country, Class, Rights

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• A good lawyer is part con man, part priest -- promising riches, threatening hell. My ethical rules are simple. I won't lie to the court or let a client do it. But I've never been in this position. How far would I go for a woman who mattered? Is there anything I wouldn't do to win?

  Paul Levine

  Lying, Winning, Simple

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• Modern societies accepted the treasures and the power offered them by science. But they have not accepted - they have scarcely even heard - its profounder message: the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises, for a complete break with the animist tradition, the definitive abandonment of the 'old covenant', the necessity of forging a new one. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself.

  Jacques Monod

  Unique, Roots, Trying

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• The five points of yama, together with the five points of niyama, remind us of the Ten Commandments of the Christtian and Jewish faiths, as well as of the ten virtues of Buddhism. In fact, there is no religion without these moral or ethical codes. All spiritual life should be based on these things. They are the foundation stones without which we can never build anything lasting. (127)

  Swami Satchidananda

  Spiritual, Buddhism, Together

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• An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.

  Ismail Kadaré

  Father, Son, Men

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• My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state... It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.

  Noam Chomsky

  Atrocities, Violence, Easy

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