"It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider."

"To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles."

"Say, "Indeed, those who invent falsehood about Allah will not succeed.""

"And do not mix the truth with falsehood or conceal the truth while you know (it)."

"Let no one say that in this case it is possible for “truth” in its turn by the help of the press to get the better of lies and errors. You who speak thus, do you venture to maintain that men regarded as a crowd are just as quick to seize upon truth which is not always palatable as upon falsehood which always is prepared delicately to give delight? … Or do you venture even to maintain that “truth” can just as quickly be understood as falsehood, which requires no preliminary knowledge, no schooling, no discipline, no abstinence, no self-denial, no honest concern about oneself, no patient labor?"

"That is because Allah is the Truth, and that which they call upon other than Him is falsehood, and because Allah is the Most High, the Grand."

"And (they are) those who do not testify to falsehood, and when they pass near ill speech, they pass by with dignity."

"ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution."

"He says in his heart: “God has forgotten. He has turned away his face. He never notices. Why has the wicked one disrespected God? He says in his heart: “You will not hold me accountable.”"

"And there is not a creation that is hidden from his sight, but all things are naked and openly exposed to the eyes of the one to whom we must give an account."

"But why do you judge your brother? Or why do you also look down on your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written: “‘As surely as I live,’ says Jehovah, ‘to me every knee will bend, and every tongue will make open acknowledgment to God.’” So, then, each of us will render an account for himself to God."

"I tell you that men will render an account on Judgment Day for every unprofitable saying that they speak; for by your words you will be declared righteous, and by your words you will be condemned."

"Addiction may be something to which some of us are predisposed, like diabetes, rather than a voluntary behavior — but it’s also reversible. A "disease model" of alcoholism and other addictions in no way diminishes our personal accountability once we know the facts. It simply suggests how hard recovery will be, and how much help we need."

"Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions--as in moral truth and accountability they are."

"When illusions are over, when the distractions of sense, the vagaries of fancy, and the tumults of passion have dissolved even before the body is cold, which once they so thronged and agitated, the soul merges into intellect, intellect into conscience, conscience into the unbroken, awful solitude of its own personal accountability; and though the inhabitants of the universe were within the spirit's ken, this personal accountability is as strictly alone and unshared, as if no being were throughout immensity but the spirit and its God."

"Think of three Things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account."

"Moral conduct includes every thing in which men are active and for which they are accountable. They are active in their desires, their affections, their designs, their intentions, and in every thing they say and do of choice; and for all these things they are accountable to God."

"Spock: The needs of the many, outweigh..."

"Concern for the common good should impel us to find ways to cultivate human development in its richest diversity... Adam Smith... felt that it shouldn’t be too difficult to institute humane policies. In his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” he observed that “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”.. This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself. If these structures can’t meet that challenge, they should be dismantled... Why should anyone defend illegitimate structures and institutions?... About 70 percent of the population, at the lower end of the wealth/income scale, has no influence on policy... Moving up the scale, influence slowly increases. At the very top are those who pretty much determine policy, by means that aren’t obscure. The resulting system is not democracy but plutocracy."

"Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

"Most important on the bearings of their life and the peace of their commonwealths, is their universal agreement in the existence of a merciful beneficent Diety, and of a future world to the duration of which a century or two are moments too brief to waste upon thoughts of fame and power and avarice; while with that agreement is combined another—viz., since they can know nothing as to the nature of that Diety beyond the fact of His supreme goodness, nor of that future world beyond the fact of its felicitous existence, so their reason forbids all angry disputes on insoluble questions. Thus they secure for that state in the bowels of the earth what no community ever secured under the light of the stars—all the blessings and consolations of a religion without any of the evils and calamities which are engendered by strife between one religion and another. (Chapter XXVI)"

"Unity, peace and security will come through the recognition—intelligently assessed—of the evils which have led to the present world situation, and then through the taking of those wise, compassionate and understanding steps which will lead to the establishing of right human relations, to the substitution of cooperation for the present competitive system, and by the education of the masses in every land as to the nature of true goodwill and its hitherto unused potency."

"The world economic council (or whatever body represents the resources of the world) must free itself from fraudulent politics, capitalistic influence and its devious scheming; it must set the resources of the earth free for the use of humanity. This will be a lengthy task but it will be possible when world need is better appreciated. An enlightened public opinion will make the decisions of the economic council practical and possible. Sharing and cooperation must be taught instead of greed and competition."

"What at this moment appears to prevent world unity... ? The answer is not hard to find and involves all nations: nationalism, capitalism, competition, blind stupid greed. The mass of men need arousing to see that good comes to all men alike and not just to a few privileged groups, and to learn also that "hatred ceases not by hatred but that hatred ceases by love". This love is not a sentiment, but practical goodwill, expressing itself through individuals, in communities and among nations."

"The common good before the individual good. (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz)"

"Throughout history, no tyrant ever rose to power except on the claim of representing ``the common good.´´ Napoleon ``served the common good´´ of France. Hitler is ``serving the common good´´ of Germany. Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by ``altruists´´ who justify themselves by-the common good."

"You are sure to encounter a certain kind of person who flies into a frenzy at the mere mention of the Masters. Such people are ready to put their trust in any shameless stock market speculation, they are ready to believe in any swindle, but for them the idea of the Common Good is inadmissible. 340."

"I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact" habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. … The frightful dilemma of the political world situation has much to do with this sin of omission on the part of our civilization. Without "ethical culture," there is no salvation for humanity."

"The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one."

"“I want to be good. I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.” “A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you on it.”"

"It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) character of purely commercial relationships that evokes the suspicion, never clearly expressed but all the more strongly felt, of ethical religions. For every purely personal relationship of man to man, of whatever sort and even including complete enslavement, may be subjected to ethical requirements and ethically regulated. This is true because the structures of these relationships depend upon the individual wills of the participants, leaving room in such relations for manifestations of the virtue of charity. But this is not the situation in the realm of economically rationalised relationships, where personal control is exercised in inverse ratio to the degree of rational differentiation of the economic structure."

"Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession."

"I suddenly felt insecure and feared becoming an employee of some firm that would turn me into a corporate slave with "work ethics" (whenever I hear the word work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity)."

"Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and 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."

"The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that lives — only that ethic can be founded in thought. … The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort."

"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil."

"Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself."

"Ethics is one of those hard things to teach because for a lot of people the answers are very personal. If you make it about artificial examples at first, then it allows people to think a little bit more safely and clearly about ethical issues."

"An adequate theory of value should be as true in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as in the philosopher’s study."

"If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time."

"After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior."

""Ethics" isn't some fixed entity but rather the continual questioning of what it means to be a good person in a good society. It draws from the classical triad of philosophy's aspirations: the good, the true, and the beautiful."

"It's never a matter of ethics versus pragmatism; it's a question of which informs the other. Humans have shown themselves capable of almost unlimited imagination and innovation—qualities that could be said to define human beings. People have used this capacity to do both great good and great harm. The point is that when humans set their minds to doing something, it's frequently possible. It makes sense to first ask what people want to do and why, from an ethical standpoint, and then get to the pragmatic how-to questions. The very process of asking what's right is how people fill out ethics in praxis, to meet new demands and dilemmas, new social conditions and contexts. Anarchism, then, brings an egalitarian ethics out into the world, making it transparent, public, and shared. It maintains an ethical orientation, while continually trying to put such notions into practice, as flawed as the effort might be. When other people come into contact with this ethical compass, they will hopefully "get it" and incorporate the same values into their lives, because it works. It offers directionality to political involvement and buttresses people's efforts to remake society. It turns surviving into thriving. That's the crucial difference between a pragmatic versus ethical impulse: people, in cooperative concert, qualitatively transform one another's lives."

"The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its τέλος but is itself the τέλος for everything outside itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it goes not further. The single individual, sensately and psychically qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his τέλος in the universal, and it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity in order to become the universal. As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal. ... Faith [in contrast to the ethical] is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal ... so that after having been in the universal he as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal."

"“Ethical issues are the cornerstone of computer ethics in cyberspace and IT society.”"

"The education of young people at the present day ... does not prepare them for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to become the objects. In sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to equip people on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse is being made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not do so much harm if education were to say: 'This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that.' Instead of this the young are made to believe that everyone else fulfills those ethical demands -- that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young, too, shall become virtuous."

"Psychoanalysis ... should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual."

"One has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless community of human beings that strive for truth. … I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people."

"Strong ethics keep corporations healthy. Poor ethics make companies sick. Values are the immune system of every organisation."