ethics

"The difficulty of exercising “social responsibility” illustrates, of course, the great virtue of private competitive enterprise — it forces people to be responsible for their own actions and makes it …"

"Morality is a private and costly luxury."

"There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that emotional intelligence represents: character."

"If the law is set aside, the humanistic amoral ethics of love then takes over. And then you have total humanism. The only consideration becomes the human being, and this is what has happened with the …"

"The events of this story are morally indefensible. But the greed that motivated the human actors—excluding of course the slaves themselves—was so overwhelming as to be irresistible. It is impossible f…"

"'But why,' , 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main th…"

"Every one of the six hundred and thirteen precepts serves to inculcate some truth, to remove some erroneous opinion, to establish proper relations in society, to diminish evil, to train in good manner…"

"Evo Morales does not qualify to run for a fourth term. It’s because that we’ve had all this convulsion, and because of this that so many Bolivians have been demonstrating in the streets."

"When a house is on fire, the neighbors' duty is to put it out. ... I hate colonialism, not the French."

"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."

"He was as great as a man can be without morality."

"At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions."

"We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else."

"The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable."

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."

"The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how cor…"

"Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances …"

"He was a decent enough guy, but he was always at his worst when he was trying to be sincere."

"Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have."

"The conqueror always assumes that his moral superiority—rather than his ferocious greed—is what has allowed him to triumph."