1,638 Quotes About Values

Ethics and morals are not designed to keep us from walking off the cliff. Rather, they’re designed to keep us from creating the cliffs that we walk off of.

Ethics are not the things that kill my fun. Rather, they are the things that keep me from getting killed by the things that I thought were fun.

No value system formed by man will ever manage the men who formed it.

Using free will, we can use the moral screening provided by conscience to act in good ways. But, if I believe that this life is the only life, then why shall I use my limited time, income and abilities to help others? How can absolute justice be provided in the crime of genocide? Even in other crimes, with perfect monitoring, prosecution and law enforcement, the suffering caused is irreversible.

In our society, it appears that rules give us a more specific idea of the things that we want to break so that we can break them more efficiently.

To do something that’s just a ‘little bit less’ than the right thing is to do a whole lot of the wrong thing.

In a culture gone increasingly rogue, it has become apparent that our actions are designed to bypass the questions whose answers would invalidate those actions. And are we naïve enough to believe that because we bypass the questions, the questions will not eventually answer themselves at our expense?

Ethics might be optional, but the consequences are not.

If the compass that I hold in my hand is driven by the agendas that I craft in my head, that compass is something more like a windmill erected in a place where the wind never stops blowing.